2024 Binghamton grad is on track for success in speed skating

Samantha Scheffler ’24 says it feels like “NASCAR on ice.”

The track inside the rink is 111 meters around. Her 17-inch blades skim along the ice as she glides into the starting position with five other skaters.

Timing is everything, down to the second. Once the gun goes off, whoever is the first across the line will likely win. And she covers 500 meters on that track in just 46.7 seconds.

For Scheffler, who graduated in May from Binghamton University’s School of Management, there is nothing in the world like short-track speed skating at 30 mph: the surroundings of the hockey rink and the cheering onlookers fade away until it’s just her, the ice and crossing that final lap.

“The gun goes off and you just have to go as fast as you can, as hard as you can. It’s a jolt that feels like that ‘zero to 40’ moment on a roller coaster,” Scheffler says. “You have to be looking at everybody else around you, listening for when somebody’s going to be speeding up from behind or picking up the pace in front of you. It’s almost like playing a chess game with the skaters around you.”

With the goal of one day qualifying for the Winter Olympic trials, Scheffler’s dedication to her training has been matched by her determination to succeed at Binghamton. Inspired by her parents’ successful business careers — her mother is a lawyer for Bank of America and her father runs a private equity real estate company — Scheffler found SOM’s business administration program offered the perfect opportunity to follow in their footsteps.

Binghamton also allowed Scheffler to balance her course load with a strict training regimen of 25–30 hours per week, taking her to Connecticut, Washington, D.C., and Utah for practice and competitions. To graduate, Scheffler balanced her skating and academic schedules by taking classes year-round.

And it’s paid off: Scheffler is ranked 15th in the nation for short-track speed skating. Her personal best performance was at the Winter World Cup trials in January 2024, where she finished seventh in the 500-meter race and 12th overall.

“I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t love it,” says Scheffler, who decided to pursue business administration full-time during her sophomore year.

“I came to really appreciate the collaborative nature of business courses and the freedom [Binghamton] gave me to pursue all of my different interests in the field,” she says. “SOM allowed me to complete a full year abroad in Amsterdam, learning not only the American business culture, but the European, as well. I was even able to spend a semester doing a deep dive into the management of high-performance sports, learning about the business behind sporting events and athletes.”

Not only did Scheffler learn how to advocate for herself in business situations, but also how to gain confidence and proficiency while working in a group and how to effectively communicate.

“I’m grateful that I could balance my studies at Binghamton with my training in a way that allows me to be a good student and set up my future, while also getting to compete in the sport that I love,” she says.

Building herself back up

It might be hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the prospect of competing as a speed skater would have never entered Scheffler’s mind.

In her family, track and field has long been the sport of choice. Throughout high school, Scheffler especially loved the 100-meter hurdles. But in her senior year, her car was T-boned, leaving her with a serious back injury that put her track-running days to an end.

After some online sleuthing, Scheffler stumbled upon a speed skating club in Danbury, Conn., just 10 minutes from her family home. It mostly involved skaters ages 50 and up, and from what Scheffler could tell, it didn’t seem too physically demanding.

Scheffler got a better idea of how incomplete her perceptions had been after she joined the club and hit the ice for the first time.

Turns out, speed skating is a physical sport.

“Everybody is racing in the same space, so you have passing and crashing, you have penalties, you have pushing, and there can be some pretty bad injuries sometimes,” she says. “But what makes it special is you have five or six skaters on the line who are going 30 mph around a corner that’s only a few meters wide — in the space of a hockey rink, on 17-inch-long blades, trying to pass at the same time. It’s very exciting!”

Just her and the ice

Despite initially underestimating the demands of speed skating, Scheffler was thrilled to discover how she could hold her own with the other skaters.

After her first practice, she met with a coach about competitive training and entered her first competition nearly three months later. At 17, Scheffler was up against women whose ages ranged from 40 to 70, all of whom more closely matched her speed.

Since then, Scheffler has managed to whittle down her time for the 500-meter race each year. When she started skating, she could finish in 1 minute and 13 seconds — she’d shave about 27 seconds off that time in just a few years.

During Scheffler’s undergraduate years, she trained with speed-skating teams around the country to maximize her ice time. After graduation, she returned to the Netherlands for training and to pursue a master’s degree at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Regardless of whether Scheffler’s next competition takes her one step closer to making the Olympic Trials (the 2026 Winter Games are in Italy), for her, the ultimate thrill behind the sport is the way she feels every time she steps on the ice.

“I’m finally honing the strategy of how to race and figuring out how it feels to be in the pack rather than just chasing and trying to hold on,” she says. “I think that’s a big part of what helped me improve so fast, that it wasn’t about reaching some arbitrary goal. I wanted to skate, I wanted to learn.”