Kova and Ross, Now in their Fifth Season together

We're now in our second year of working with head coach Christine Fowler-Binder, who comes down from LA each week armed with her technical expertise, fantastic creative style and upbeat personality to whip our Free Dance into shape.

Our head coach of many years, Olympian Ice Dancer Suzy Semanick-Schurmann made the jump in 2008 to the East coast following her dream of finding more ice dance teams to nurture than the West coast has to offer. She remains a part of our coaching team and great friend, with occasional training visits in both directions in the offing. We are thriving under the tutelage of multi-talented and vivacious Christine Fowler-Binder. Jonathan Nichols, who trained and competed under the direction of the great Michigan ice dance coaches, is now part of the Kova and Ross coaching team. SDIA Skating School Director Wendy Smith also greatly contributed to the team's training in compusory dances. Together, these talented and accomplished coaches are all busy training, challenging, motivating, cajoling, and pushing us to reach our highest potential. It's still a "work in progress", but the process has been both exhilarating and exhausting, but definitely highly satisfying. The team's skill levels have soared in the last year, with Kassy completing her Gold Dances, and Justin almost there, working on his Gold Dances.

We also trained for two years with former national and international Pairs competitor Bob Pellaton, who has helped us immensely with our lifts and spins, and US National Ice Dance Champion Darlene Gilbert, who contributed to our compulsory dance skill development.

Ballet instructor Cathy Carbonne ensures that our strength and flexibility are pushed to the max, in our weekly lessons. We warm up each day off ice, doing general strength and aerobic conditioning, partner dance and balance drills, and perfecting our off-ice lifts. We've included some fun pictures from our off-ice workout below.

In addition to our on-ice training, we have made a critical change in our Ballroom dance training. We've become pretty excited about ballroom dancing, and moved to a new studio -- Dance Motion Studios -- in northern San Diego. There, top national professional latin competitor Robert Kacprzak is going back to basics and teaching us the necessary technique to compete in all of the International Ballroom Dances. Our favorite ballroom dances are still the Samba and the Jive, because they are both so quick and lively, however we are also learning to love the Foxtrot and the Viennese Waltz as we master them more. We really love ballroom dancing together, and practice our ballroom routines for about an hour every day!  We've begun competing in International Ballroom Dances, and have done very well in our first ballroom dance events, enticing us to push even harder to evolve more.

Now if all that is not enough, we go train at the gym too, four times a week for an hour and a half of aerobics, weight training and a once-per-week yoga class to increase our flexibility!

We train about thirty hours a week total at the San Diego Ice Arena - our home, between our on-ice private lessons, on-ice practice sessions, off-ice conditioning, ballet, moves-in-the-field and ballroom dancing and work-outs at the YMCA. Its kind of like a full-time job... except we both love it! Its fun, working this much, we really have seen ourselves greatly improve over the three years, but we realize we have so much yet to accomplish.

We set aside time to go out and have fun together too. We believe that this is sometimes just as important as getting in that extra hour of on-ice practice together! This winter we've enjoyed a great trip to the local mountains to ski, a day at Disneyland, our Winter Formal dance, as well as regular evenings out to dinner and to enjoy the opera performed by the San Diego Opera.

To see some FUN photos of us - click here!