In the quiet hours of the morning, before parents drop off kids for hockey practice and before teenagers flood the lobby with iced coffees and backpacks, the rink belongs to Starr Andrews. She slips through the doors like muscle memory, laces up without fanfare, and steps onto the ice the same way she steps into the world — confidently, purposefully, as though she’s answering a calling only she can hear.

For Andrews, this frozen rectangle in Southern California is not just a training space. It’s a second home. “I’m here more than anywhere else,” she says, laughing as if she’s caught herself in a truth too obvious to deny. “Some days, it’s literally just me in the whole building.”

That solitude isn’t lonely. It’s grounding. It’s where she found herself — and where the rest of the world found her, too.

Starr Andrews is not simply a figure skater. She is a study in devotion. A young woman who, at 21, has already carved her name into a sport that once refused to imagine someone like her. When she became the first Black U.S. figure skater to win a Grand Prix medal, she didn’t just make history — she shattered a ceiling thickened by decades of gatekeeping.

“It felt like a dream,” she says of that moment. “Like I was watching it happen to someone else.” She remembers standing next to her coach, scanning the leaderboard again and again, convinced the numbers might rearrange. They didn’t. She had done it. Not with theatrics, not with a reinvention — but with her. With years of quiet work, early mornings, discipline, and grit disguised as grace.

Starr’s introduction to skating wasn’t cinematic. It was maternal. Her earliest memories are of sitting on the rink’s boards, watching her mother glide across the ice. “I fell in love with it before I ever stepped on,” she says. “I knew that’s where I belonged.”

There weren’t skates small enough for her tiny feet back then, so she watched, waited, and absorbed everything. By the time she finally touched the ice, it felt less like a first step and more like a return. She tried gymnastics, too — briefly. But that decision, like most things in her life, came from instinct. “It was always skating,” she says simply.

Her mother, Toshawa Andrews — part guardian, part coach, part spiritual ballast — has been her constant. Starr talks about her with the reverence of someone who understands how much lighter life feels when you’re not carrying it alone.

“I had a heart condition,” she reveals. “Supraventricular tachycardia. The first time it happened, I thought I was dying.” She called her mother. “She talked me through it. She’s been with me through everything.”

And when Starr says everything, she means it. The triumphs. The injuries. The heartbreaks. The invisible pressure that comes with being “first.” The whispered assumptions that being a beautiful, talented young Black woman somehow makes the journey easier — when in reality, it often makes it lonelier.

Her coach, Derrick Delmore, whom she’s trained with since she was 12, has become another cornerstone. “He’s seen every version of me,” she says. “Good days, bad days, breakdowns, competitions, everything.” She calls him her second dad. It’s not hyperbole; it’s truth.

The two of them have traveled the world together, sharing hotel breakfasts and pre-competition nerves. He knows when to push and when to pull back. He knows her stride, her confidence, her tells. He knows that beneath the calm elegance of her skating is a fire that has carried her through more than most people realize.

When she skates, her mind quiets. “Honestly, nothing’s running through my head,” she admits. “It’s just me out there. And music. And movement.”

It’s a kind of meditation — one built from muscle memory and years of repetition.

What the world sees as effortless is, in truth, years of unglamorous training: ankles rubbed raw from new boots, blades that need breaking in, falls that bruise the body and the ego. Yet Starr skates with a softness that betrays the labor behind it.

Even while showing Jamila Mustafa how to simply glide or pivot, she carries the ease of someone who has mastered the impossible. She laughs as Jamila tries to mimic her, offering pointers with the patience of a big sister. There’s no ego in her correction — no sense of superiority. Just joy. Just generosity.

If you ask Starr where she goes from here, she won’t talk about medals or rankings or international titles — though she has the talent to chase all of it. Instead, she talks about presence. About living moment to moment. About gratitude.

“It’s never been about going from A to Z,” she says. “It’s just… this moment. And then the next one. And the next one.”

She knows she’s a role model now — whether she wanted it or not. She knows little girls with brown skin and big dreams see themselves in her. That matters. Because she remembers being that girl once, searching for someone who looked like her on the ice — and rarely finding it.

Now, she is the image she once needed.

As the interview winds down, Starr glides away and offers to perform her signature butterfly. She lands it cleanly, effortlessly, as if gravity is optional. It’s a flash of brilliance — a reminder that beneath the humility and calm exterior is an athlete whose talent demands attention.

She skates back, smiling, cheeks flushed from movement. A star in motion.

Not manufactured.
Not molded.
Not made for virality.

Just made for this.

Because in a sport where elegance is expected but excellence is rare, Starr Andrews is something even rarer: a young woman creating space where there was none, and doing it with grace sharp enough to cut through ice.

And she’s only just getting started.