When the current skating season started 16-year-old Breken Brezden’s goal was to qualify for the Canadian Tire National Skating Championships.

To do so, she had to finish in the top 18 skaters from among the 37 other competitors hitting the ice at the recent Skate Canada Challenge in Winnipeg.

The only Manitoban in the event, Brezden accomplished that goal, finishing 10th overall, thus qualifying to compete at nationals, Jan. 9 to 15 in Oshawa, Ont.

Brezden started skating at the age of four. Her dad Brian, first put her in hockey skates.

“Because he was a hockey player,” Brezden noted.

After Brezden was registered for CanSkate, it wasn’t long before her local instructor Donna Kemp-Drysdale told her parents to get her into figure skates.

“Because I don’t think I’m really built for hockey,” she said.

Kemp-Drysdale has had a great influence on Brezden’s skating, teaching her a lot of the basics.

“She’s taught me all of my dances pretty much. She’s taught me the good skating skills and good work ethic. She really started me young on those types of things,” Brezden said, adding Kemp-Drysdale was also the one who encouraged her to start learning under guidance of Patricia Hole, a professional skating coach based in Virden.

Kemp-Drysdale had told Brezden she didn’t think she could provide the resources and knowledge to keep improving.

“I’m super thankful for her and all the things that she’s been able to help me with and the fact that she’s been able to pass me on to more coaches who can really help me out,” Brezden said.

Brezden has always considered herself to be someone who enjoys skating, something Kemp-Drysdale saw, as well.

“That’s why she told my dad, ‘you’ve got to get that girl in figure skates,’,” she said.

Brezden has been training under Hole for about seven or eight years now, initially traveling to Virden once a week.

“But as things progressed and I really wanted to get more competitive and I was really more committed to it, we started seeing her more often,” she said.

While it took some time to adjust to the travel, eventually, the Brezdens got used to it.

“I’m really thankful for my dad. He calls himself my chauffeur for skating. I’m thankful for him for being able to make all this time and drive me out to Virden and to Brandon and to Yorkton when it’s horrible driving conditions,” she said.

Brezden’s mother has family in Hamilton, Ont., and it was while visiting last Christmas that she skated with the local skating club.

“It was for a couple days and then we came back. And then this summer is where we really kicked it up and we said that’s the place that I need to be, because they have a lot of good competitive skaters there and I wanted to be around that. And I wanted to have that intensity of training,” she explained. “So we decided for the summer, we went there and I skated for about five weeks.”

At the end of the summer, a decision was made for Brezden to continue training in Hamilton through the fall and early part of winter.

“For me, I realized I had been progressing so much and I really felt like I was making improvements and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to keep that same rate of improvement up as we were coming back to Dauphin and having to drive everywhere,” she said, adding she is thankful she made that decision. “Because it’s turned out really well so far to move out there for a bit for my first semester of classes and to really work hard and train with the coaches in Hamilton,” she said.

To accommodate her training, Brezden is taking courses online.

Brezden has noticed an improvement in her skating herself since she started training in Hamilton and it is showing in the results.

“From the past competitions, we’ve just kept building, kept on making those, whether they be small steps or big steps, we just kept on making those improvements,” she said.

One of the highlights of her training in Hamilton came a couple of months ago when Brezden hit her first triple flip, which was a great accomplishment.

“It’s been a jump that I was working on for quite a while throughout the summer. The feeling of landing a new jump is always a really good feeling, because it’s satisfying because you know it’s something you’ve been working towards and you’ve been really wanting to get,” she said, adding it will be a while before she is confident enough to incorporate the jump into her program. “I definitely need to gain more consistency on it, though, because right now, it’s not to the point where I can include into my programs. For now. I’m continuing to work on it and hopefully, we can get there.”

Last month, Brezden won the gold medal at provincials, a feat which gave her a good feeling to be able to skate well in her home province.

There was some trepidation at the Skate Canada Challenge as to whether Brezden would qualify for nationals after her long program skate wasn’t as good as she had hoped it would be. But there was a sense of relief when she realized she had made it.

“That’s been my goal for this whole season. That’s what has helped push me through the hard training moments,” she said.

Brezden’s goal for nationals is to train to get her triple-triple into her short program.

“And I just want to go out there and have the best skates that I can. Do what I know I can do and what I’ve been doing in training,” she said.

Throughout her skating endeavours, Brezden has received a lot of support from her family and friends, which she appreciates.

Her dad, she said, spends a lot of time on Facebook and constantly posts updates on her. And when she can’t read the comments herself, he reads them to her.

“It’s nice to have people believe in you. It’s a good feeling, for sure,” she said, adding there was a lot of family and friends at the Challenge in Winnipeg cheering her on. “I’m really thankful for it and it’s nice to know they have an interest in what I love to do and what I’m doing,” she said.
Brezden admits the Olympics is a dream, but at this point in her career, it is a distant dream.

“I have a lot of goals that I need to get before that point. People don’t realize, the Olympics is the competition that’s put on a pedestal to everybody. I think they don’t understand how difficult it actually is to get to that level of competition. It’s pretty crazy,” she said. “That would definitely be a dream, but baby steps for now.”