Figure Skater Rory Flack Previews Breaking The Ice and Her Coaching Style

Rory Flack has an impressive ice-skating career, winning medals in the 1980s and making history by being the first African American to enter the US Open Professional Figure Skating Championships. She was also the first African American to land a backflip there.

Flack has continued to make history by coaching the first diverse synchronized ice-skating team called Team DMV (Divine, Motivational, Visionaries). These teenagers strive to make it to the ISI’s national championships, but they must come together and deal with struggles and rivalries.

As head coach, Rory Flack is determined that her girls break through the barriers diverse athletes face and come out as champions. WEtv is capturing Rory Flack’s journey of leading these girls to succeed in an eight-hour docuseries titled Breaking The Ice.

TV Fanatic chatted with Flack about her career, the drama of figure skating, her coaching methods, and the allure of the new series.

Check it out below:

Hi Rory. I’ve been a massive figure skating fan since the late 1980s or early 1990s. Can you tell me about your experience winning the US Open Professional Figure Skating Championships and being the first African American woman to land a backflip?

The experience was terrific. When I’m performing, I always give it my all and feel like my all will be the best. At the US Open, when I finished and got those 10s, all I ever wanted to hear was that the judges thought I was the best. That was a remarkable journey for me.

That’s where I did my first backflip, which was a great accomplishment and made history simultaneously. It was amazing.

Now you’re making history again, coaching Team DMV. What inspired you to form this synchronized team of girls?

In my lifetime, I’ve not been able to coach a lot of skaters of color, and being here in the DMV, I was getting an influx of kids, and at one point, I thought it would be great just to put them all together because they come and go and just putting them all together would be such great camaraderie.

It’s just something that I think we can do, so we got it done. What you get to see on Breaking the Ice is the vaccine of becoming a champion.

And it’s a family affair because you’re working with your husband and son. How is that?

Oh, that’s awesome. We work together daily, so this was just another outlet for us to put our talents together and grow a community.

So, what can you tease about this series, Breaking the Ice? Can you give us little tidbits about the girls and what some of their skills are?

You’re going to see incredible growth from some of these girls, and you’re going to see them as skaters and as the mindset of champions.

The positivity will emerge more, and then you’ll see some drama. You’re going to see some drama from the parents. You’re going to see real-life happening in figure skating.

Figure skating has always had drama for as long as I’ve watched.

Oh yes. But before the Tonya and Nancy drama and before the Olympics and us having to change our system, we were that prim and proper sport, and you had to be a certain way. It was a very prestigious sport, and there was no drama.

So, you didn’t get to see the drama, and now you get to know the reality of what it takes and the struggle from the coach to the skater to the parent. We all have different struggles when we’re on the ice and when we get off the ice, and it’s a different struggle. So, you’ll get to see that.

So, will it be a behind-the-scenes reality series where we’ll see the drama before every competition or performance each week?

Most definitely. You’ll get to see the buildup; you’ll get to see the drama and the triumphs because exciting things will happen within that drama.

How do you think your coaching methods differ from some of the other coaches these girls have had, and why do you think your team will succeed?

I’m firm and quick to correct. That’s something that makes them stronger that people don’t understand. If you have a four-minute program and I let you go through four minutes and then I correct it, we do four minutes one more time. That’s only four minutes.

If I correct you throughout the entire thing, and we stop, and we start, and we stop, and we start, by the time you finish, you’ve done 10 minutes of a program. You’ve pushed through, gotten more cardio, and your mind is stronger. It’s a stronger way of teaching for me to change the action quickly.

That makes sense. Why did you choose to do a synchro team versus a singles team or another kind of figure skating?

Synchro is the most prominent and most up-and-coming part of figure skating. We’re trying to show the world it is as strong as the singles. There are movements that they have to do that become more and more difficult.

So, it’s a part of this sport that not a lot of people see, and it’s a relatively inexpensive sport that we’re trying to bring out so that we can have more diversity on the ice.

Very interesting. I admit I don’t know as much about synchro as some of the other facets of figure skating, so I found it very interesting to watch.

I’m glad that you got something out of it. Are you excited to watch the whole season?

I am. And why do you think that other figure skating fans will enjoy the series?

I think that the fans of figure skating are going to enjoy my style of coaching and see a different type of learning.

They’ll enjoy seeing a different facet and another way to grow as skaters, and maybe they’ll start to incorporate some of the things we do into their training.

We get even more technical as we get into it. The fans of figure skating and the figure skaters will like it because they will recognize, understand and then probably see themselves in the moments.

Breaking the Ice premieres at 9/8c on Thursday, July 6, on WEtv, with all-new episodes streaming Mondays on ALLLBK.

Laura Nowak is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow her on X.