Tonia Kwiatkowski

Tonia Kwiatkowski (born February 12, 1971) is an American figure skater and coach. She is a two-time Winter Universiade champion, a winner of two silver medals on the Champions Series, and the 1996 U.S. national silver medalist. She finished in the top ten at two World Championships and competed in 13 U.S. Championships. Carol Heiss Jenkins and Glyn Watts were her longtime coaches. Kwiatkowski retired from amateur skating in 1998 and continues to be involved in the sport as a skater and coach.

In domestic competition, she represented the Winterhurst Figure Skating Club based in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio.

Kwiatkowski was born on February 12, 1971 in Cleveland, Ohio. She graduated from Lakewood High School in Ohio. In June 1994, she earned a degree in communications and psychology from Cleveland's Baldwin-Wallace College. She was frequently lauded by television commentators for pursuing her post-secondary education while competing at the highest levels of the sport, a rare combination in figure skating, which typically demands four to six hours of daily practice to remain competitive at the elite level. While 1980s skating greats Debi Thomas (Stanford BA, Northwestern MD) and Paul Wylie (Harvard BA, MBA) had managed to do both, by Kwiatkowski's era in the middle and late 1990s, as professional opportunities in figure skating were multiplying in the wake of the Kerrigan-Harding scandal, there were seemingly very few skaters on the scene pursuing a college degree. According to a March 18, 1996 Los Angeles Times article, Kwiatkowski's college degree was duly noted as "...most of her competitors have not finished high school."

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