The U.S. skating community was in mourning on Thursday after learning several skaters were on an American Airlines regional passenger plane that crashed near Reagan Washington National Airport. The plane,

The young figure skaters whose lives were cut tragically short when an American Airlines flight collided with an Army helicopter and crashed into the Potomac River on Wednesday night were just beginning their journeys to stardom.

Six people associated with Zeghibe’s club in Norwood, Massachusetts, were killed in the plane crash: skater Spencer Lane and his mother, Christine, skater Jinna Han and her mother, Jin, and coaches Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, a married couple who were world champion pairs figure skaters from Russia in the 1990s.