Damon Allen remembers well how he felt about Amber Glenn after seeing her performances in the junior event at the 2014 U.S. Championships.
“I thought, ‘This girl is going to be the next star,’” Allen recalled last week.
There is, of course, a tendency in figure skating to anoint the next big thing prematurely. Still, Allen’s reaction did not seem impulsively hasty.
After all, the 14-year-old Glenn had shown preternatural poise in winning the title. Her free skate earned a score better than those of all except the three medalists in the senior event, despite juniors having one fewer scoring element.
Yet it would take another decade for Glenn to win an event other than one national qualifying competition.
“This was not an overnight success, to say the least,” Glenn told NBC Sports earlier this season.
In the 10 years between becoming junior national champion and getting that next notable victory, at last season’s senior national championships, Glenn’s career rarely reflected intimations of the stardom that had seemed about to come.
They were 10 years in which she left the sport once, 2015, suffering from depression, and almost did it again in 2022 after Covid ruined her chance at making the Beijing Olympics. She was beleaguered by two serious concussions and by competitive inconsistency to a degree that even her triumph at last season’s US. Championships was marred by two major free skate mistakes that left her looking crestfallen.
“It wasn’t exactly how I wanted to get my first (senior) national title,” Glenn said then.
And when she followed it with two lackluster skates at the 2024 World Championships, there were questions about how far Glenn could go this season.
The answer is to places she has never been, including this week’s Grand Prix Final in Grenoble, France, where the women’s event begins Thursday with the short program.
“She has finally figured it out this year,” Allen said.
Glenn began the season with her first international triumph, at the Challenger Series Lombardia Trophy, where personal best scores in the short program, free skate and total carried her past three-time reigning world champion Kaori Sakamoto of Japan.
“Lombardia was a big confidence boost, for sure,” Glenn said.
Next was a victory at the Grand Prix of France, where her short program score was the highest ever earned by a U.S. woman.
Then came victory at the Grand Prix Cup of China, where she improved her personal bests in the total score and free skate despite a sore right ankle and shin from a fall in practice. She got a passel of those points for a triple loop-double Axel-double Axel sequence in the second half of the free skate, an element that has the highest base value of any attempted by a senior woman in international competition this season.
The first place in China made Glenn the first U.S. woman to win two regular season Grand Prix events since Ashley Wagner in 2012. It also gave Glenn one of the six places in the Grand Prix Final, joining defending champion Sakamoto and four other Japanese women.
“I’m just so shocked and excited,” Glenn said about making the Final for the first time.
Allen, who has coached Glenn along with Tammy Gambill in Colorado Springs for the last two seasons, is equally excited by the progress she has made since deciding to remain in the sport after her disappointment in 2022. Weakened by Covid at the 2022 U.S. Championships, for which she did not test positive until after finishing 14th in the short program, she had to withdraw. The year before, Glenn had been second at nationals.
“I don’t want to finish skating the way last year went,” she told Allen.
What started as a decision to continue for one more season, uprooting her life in suburban Dallas and moving to Colorado, has become a commitment to stay at least through 2026, when, at 26, she could become the oldest U.S. woman in 98 years to compete in singles in the Olympics.
Unafraid to show the full range of her emotions or talk about her mental health issues, Glenn is even more fearless in her prominent support of the LGBTQ+ community.
“She’s the best advocate,” Allen said.
She wears a pride pin on her warmup jackets and acknowledged the history she made last January, becoming the first openly queer U.S. women’s singles champion, by holding the Progress Pride flag during her victory lap.
“Every person has their own path, right?” Allen said. “This being the way that her path has turned out is why she’s so great now -- with the maturity she has after having to go through the struggles and having to go through the mental issues. I think she loves what she does way more and appreciates it much more than she did when she was younger.”
It is fairly typical for skaters who make a coaching change not to see results for a year or more. Allen said Glenn needed to shuck her longtime habit of not doing full program run-throughs while training for a competition.
“Just kind of understanding how to train was a big thing,” Allen said. “It wasn’t that she wasn’t in shape to do it. She just wasn’t doing it.”
In her eighth full season of senior international competition, Glenn has yet to do two clean programs (no negative grades of execution) at the same event. But she has gone “triple Axel clean,” having landed one cleanly in both the short program and free skate at Lombardia.
Often in a competitive free skate, Glenn’s mind ran ahead of her body. She would be mentally exhausted by the halfway point, and errors big and small often followed.
Realizing that, the coaches rejiggered the order of her free skate elements so the demanding step sequence would be after the final jump. A year ago, she had three of her seven jumping passes after the step sequence.
She also started doing neurotherapy last spring to “get my brain to calm down,” not easy when ADHD and anxiety are frequent companions. She has seen the impact of the therapy on several occasions, notably the free skate at the French Grand Prix, when she had a big lead after the short program but made mistakes that could have made her completely unravel, as she often had before.
“I’ve been able to overcome challenges that would have been very hard for me in the past, so I’m very happy with how I kept everything together,” Glenn said in France.
She felt similarly after the Cup of China short program, in which she reeled off the final five elements flawlessly after her first two drew negative GOEs.
“I am happy I was able to recover after a mistake,” Glenn said. “That is big progress for me.”
Glenn describes this season as a building process, trying to gain competitive consistency rather than push her limits. She called her free skate in China “75%.” She is holding something back for the second half of this season and the upcoming Olympic season.
“As many people know, in the past I’ve had struggles keeping it together for an entire free skate program,” she said. “So for me it has been about just being stable rather than putting out 110% because sometimes when I do that, I make very silly mistakes.”
Even as she racked up the stunning short program score in France, Glenn knew she could have done more, toning down some choreography to preserve energy. That is evidence of her feeling a body-mind connection more clearly.
“I feel like this year has been about the mental side,” she said. “I’ve always been capable on the physical side, so it’s been about just trying to do the best I can to hone my mental skills, and it’s been very helpful.”
It has brought her to the Grand Prix Final as a solid medal contender. Among senior skaters this season, only Sakamoto has higher scores for the short program, free skate and total.
Her early shooting star success has faded, but Amber Glenn is slowly becoming one of the stable bright lights in her sport.
Philip Hersh, who has covered figure skating at the last 12 Winter Olympics, is a special contributor to NBCSports.com.
