Former Disney on Ice Star Finds New Purpose Coaching Skaters in Eugene

Elaine Maddren Pruett was standing on the ice at the Eugene Rink Exchange in 2013, her toddler daughter at her side, when something shifted. It was the first time she had skated in seven years, and the feeling was immediate. "It just ignited that passion again," Pruett said. "I missed it so much. It honestly saved my life because I was really depressed at the time."

That moment at the Eugene rink, quiet and unplanned, marked the beginning of what is now a 13-year coaching career for the 55-year-old who had previously spent 17 years performing internationally with Disney on Ice. Today she is known throughout Eugene as the friendly face behind the boards at the Rink Exchange, a coach and costume maker whose path to this Oregon city ran through northeast England, global touring stages, and some of the hardest losses a person can absorb.

A Rink in Billingham, a Babysitter, and a Gift

Pruett grew up in Billingham, a town in northeast England, raised by a single mother who could not afford skating lessons. It was her babysitter who first brought her to the local ice rink, and from the moment Pruett stepped onto the ice at age 9, she understood something about herself. "It's like walking for me," she said.

Without money for formal instruction, she did what resourceful kids do: she watched. Pruett taught herself jumps and spins by studying other skaters until one of the rink's coaches took notice and offered to teach her for free until her family could pay. That act of generosity set everything in motion. With coaching, Pruett advanced quickly, winning several competitions at a young age.

Skating was more than sport for the shy, red-haired girl who faced bullying from peers. She described the rink as an escape, a place where she found confidence she could not locate anywhere else. Skating, she has said, saved her life when she was young.

One of Six from Ninety

At 15, Pruett made the decision many teenagers make when life pulls in multiple directions: she stepped back from skating. It would not last. Two years later, her old coach called with news that Disney on Ice was coming to the local rink in Billingham for auditions. She had exactly two weeks to prepare.

She fell during a couple of her tricks. It did not matter. Out of 90 auditionees, Pruett was one of six selected. At 18, having barely left England before, she began traveling the world with Disney on Ice. The contrast was enormous: a self-taught skater from a single-parent household in northeast England, suddenly performing on international stages.

Her 17-year career with Disney on Ice carried her across continents and, along the way, gave her an unexpected second skill. Although she never had any formal training in the craft, Pruett's costume-making took off. That combination of performance experience and hands-on creativity would later define her identity in Eugene just as much as her coaching.

From Florida to Yachats to the Rink Exchange

After 17 years of touring, Pruett eventually left Disney on Ice and lived in Florida for a time before she and her husband moved to Yachats, Oregon, in 2011, where his parents lived. The small coastal community on the central Oregon coast was a far quieter stage than anything she had performed on, and for a while that was fine.

Then 2013 arrived. Pruett was feeling lost. Her mother had died in England. Another friend had died as well. Grief has a way of hollowing out the familiar, and Pruett found herself unmoored from the identity she had built across two decades of ice performance. She drove to Eugene and took her toddler-age daughter to visit the Rink Exchange, perhaps not expecting much. Then she stepped onto the ice for the first time in seven years, and everything she had described as essential to her younger self came flooding back.

The passion she had set aside, the confidence she had first found in Billingham, the physical sensation of a sport that felt as natural as walking: all of it returned at once. Depression had taken hold during those years away from the ice, and the return, she said plainly, saved her life.

Building a Community at the Eugene Rink Exchange

What began as a personal reckoning in 2013 has since grown into something the Eugene skating community depends on. Pruett has now been coaching at the Eugene Rink Exchange for 13 years, long enough that newer skaters in the city may not know her story extends far beyond Oregon. She is known simply as the friendly local ice skating coach and costume maker, a description that understates the circuitous, often painful journey that produced her.

Her costume-making, developed without formal instruction during her Disney on Ice years, continues alongside her coaching work. The combination is fitting: both disciplines require an eye for detail, patience with incremental progress, and an understanding that performance, whether on ice or in costume design, is built from countless small decisions made in practice.

Why the Story Resonates

Pruett's biography contains two distinct moments in which she credits skating with saving her life, one in childhood when bullying made the rink her only refuge, and one in adulthood when grief and depression made returning to it an act of survival. The repetition is not rhetorical. It reflects a genuine, recurring relationship between a person and a physical practice that gave her structure when nothing else did.

For the skaters she coaches at the Rink Exchange, the woman running their sessions is a former international performer who was chosen from 90 competitors at 17, who spent 17 years on the road with one of the most recognizable entertainment brands in the world, and who ultimately found her way to Eugene by following a husband, a daughter, and a feeling she could not stay away from any longer. That backstory is now part of what Eugene's skating community quietly contains, offered week after week at a rink on the edge of a mid-size Oregon city by a woman who learned, more than once, that the ice has a way of giving back.