As a figure skater, Justin Hampole strives for perfection.
He tries to get everything about his movements on the ice precise and perform each element technically correct, sometimes obsessing about even the tiniest mistakes.
That attitude will likely serve the aspiring orthopedic surgeon well in his work career but it sometimes leads to problems when he tries to put all he's learned about skating together in a three-minute 42-second long program.
His coaches at the Northern B.C. Centre for Skating, Rory Allen and Andrea Ludditt, try to convince the 15-year-old it's not in his own best interests to sweat the small stuff - better to forget about his mistakes and move on - but that's much easier said than done.
Hampole still ranks among the best in the province at what he does. Two weekends ago at the Autumn Leaves Super Series competition in Kamloops he earned the silver medal in the under-17 novice men's event, his final tune-up before he heads to Kelowna for the B.C./Yukon section championships, Nov. 10-13.
"He is very much a worrier, mentally, and I think the biggest downfall with Justin is he is a perfectionist," said Ludditt. "Sometimes that ability to go, 'That wasn't perfect,' can carry on to the next thing. If he can just be OK sometimes with the execution and with the repetition of the execution, the excellence will come.
"But on the flipside of that coin it's what makes him brilliant. He's just so focused and detail-orientated and so precise. That's his character and we don't want to change that, but we just have to work within that."
Hampole says he continually tries to visualize what he's going to do on the ice so he can perform up to his capabilities and minimize his falls. But there's a lot to take in, especially in his long program, and his programs are continually changing.
"If you go down on the first jump in your program you can't just think it's over, you have like seven more to do," he said. "I'm still struggling with mental toughness. My training before the competition has to be really consistent and I have to push through some stuff, but I think I'm learning techniques to stay tough mentally for competitions.
"Autumn Leaves was definitely a big step in the right direction, I was really happy with my short program and did some nice things, and my long program was pretty good too. I opened with a nice triple Lutz, which got (high marks) from the judges."
Hampole regularly sticks his triple Lutz, triple Salchow and triple loop and is close to adding triple toe and triple flip to his jump repertoire. He can land the latter two, but still needs to work at getting them down with regularity.
"It's a really big boost in confidence when I go into competitions that I have these really solid triples so I can really show them off now," Hampole said. "I still struggle with consistency with my triple Sal and sometimes I take pretty bad falls with it, but that's part of the game. You definitely get a lot of bruises. But I do dryland work every day and I think that's why my jumps are getting better."
Getting to the stage he's at right now didn't happen overnight. Hampole has been figure skating since he was six and he trains nine months of the year. Now that he's nearing the critical part of his competition schedule, he's at the rink eight times a week training for at least 20 hours each week.
The section meet is a qualifier for the Skate Canada Challenge junior national championships Nov. 30 to Dec. 4 in Pierrefonds, Que. Hampole also hopes to qualify for the 2017 Canadian Tire senior national championships in Ottawa, Jan. 16-22 and wants to crack the top eight this time around. He expects to move up to the junior category next year.
"If you do a comparison from last season to this season, last season he had one double Axel and a triple, this season he has a double Axel and five triples," said Ludditt. "We're not doing all five in the program, we're doing triple Lutz, triple loop and triple Sal and that's a massive difference.
"The stakes are pretty high for him right now but that's his character and he's up for the challenge."
Like most kids his age, Hampole is going through a growth spurt and has had to get used to his new body. He now stands five-foot-six and weighs 120 pounds.
"He's grown very proportionally, which is a huge blessing," said Ludditt. "He's staying fairly compact but in that has gained a lot of strength. Especially for triple jumps, you have to be incredibly strong from top to bottom. You have to get the height from the legs and work against the G-force in the air with the upper body to hit in the position to land. You need full-body strength."
Nearly two years ago, Hampole conquered his nerves and passed the biggest test of his career when he won the pre-novice bronze medal at the 2015 Canada Winter Games, performing in front of a hometown audience in a packed Kin 1 rink.
"It's still one of the highlights of my skating," Hampole said.
"When I got on the ice for my long program I was like, 'I don't think I can do this.' There was so much pressure. But once I got out there I knew I could do it. Once you get your first jump done you can take the energy from the crowd and use it."
Since September, Hampole has been attending Canadian Sport School Northern BC, a program for high-performance athletes overseen by Engage Sport North (formerly known as PacificSport Northern BC). So far this semester he's an A-student in all his courses.
Hampole goes to his regular high school classes in the morning at Duchess Park secondary school, where he's enrolled in two core subjects, then takes the bus to the UNBC campus for his afternoon classes at the Northern Sport Centre. Students aged 15 to 18 from various sports train together in the NSC weight room, gym and fieldhouse where they focus on strength and conditioning, sprint training and gymnastics movements while learning about nutrition, mental preparation, and goal-setting.
The Sport School offers young athletes flexibility in their academic schedules so they can attend competitions and practices in their chosen sport. Hampole says he likes being around other athletes, watching how they train, which he says has helped him progress as a figure skater.
"I'm taking stuff from different sports like skiing and basketball, like the quickness of the feet - it's really cool," he said. "Most of the stuff we do for skating is sport-specific."
Three other NBCCS athletes are entered in the section meet: Jayna Mason,13, juvenile women; Reece Jobson, 15, pre-novice men; and Ally Norum, 12, juvenile women.
