- Sandra Sparger was one of a team of coaches training 16-year-old figure skating protégé Edward Zhou before he and his parents died in the Washington, D.C., plane collision last month
- “Right from the beginning, [Edward] had a lot of talent,” she tells PEOPLE, “Just such a friendly guy. So warm”
- The community has started a fundraiser for the extended Zhou family
Coach Sandra Sparger is grieving 16-year-old figure skating protégé Edward Zhou and his parents — all of whom were killed in the Washington, D.C., plane crash on Jan. 29.
Sparger will miss Edward’s hugs the most.
“He’s such a compassionate kid, such a loving child, a big hugger,” explains the 66-year-old former competitive figure skater, who began teaching Edward “moves in the field” when he was 8.
“He just loved skating,” Sparger tells PEOPLE.
She was one of a team of coaches who helped train Edward and other teens in a tight-knit skating community in Fairfax, Va. With their coaches’ help, Edward and other members of the Skating Club of Northern Virginia competed in the U.S. Figure Skating Championships last month, followed by a prestigious training camp in Wichita, Kan.
Edward was traveling back from Wichita to Washington on American Airlines Flight 5342 with his parents, Yu Zhou and Kaiyan Mao, when a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with the plane as it was preparing to land at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
All 64 people on the jet, as well as the three soldiers in the helicopter, died. The crash remains under investigation.
Other families from the skating club were also on board: 12-year-old Brielle Beyer and her mom, Justyna Beyer; and 16-year-old Cory Haynos and his parents, Stephanie and Roger Haynos. In total, 28 people from the figure skating community died.
Sparger had gone to sleep on the night of Jan. 29 — only to be jarred awake by multiple alerts on her phone.
“All of a sudden at 1:30-ish in the morning, I just kept hearing my phone dinging me,” she recalls. “So, I went down to get it and my first text message was, ‘Sandy, turn on the TV.’ That’s when I heard and I lost it.”
Sparger was undone by the news. While she trained Edward for about six years, she says she’d also previously coached Brielle and Cory.
“All my kids” were gone, she says.
“They were our great kids,” she adds. “They were everybody’s kids.”
The figure skating community in Fairfax is a friendly, interconnected web of kids, parents and coaches. Edward was a standout when it came to both skill and kindness, Sparger says.
“Right from the beginning, [Edward] had a lot of talent,” she says, “Just such a friendly guy. So warm.”
His parents, who moved to the U.S. from China, were equally sweet and “very supportive” of Edward, Sparger says.
Brian McMurry, whose 16-year-old son Kai used to skate with Edward, also knew the Zhous.
“When they first started, the boys weren’t able to lace up their own skates,” says McMurry, 57, who first became friendly with the family in 2017, “so [Yu] or I were tying laces on ice skates for the boys.”
Though the families lost touch after Kai stopped skating (he went on to play baseball), McMurry, a federal employee, remembers the couple’s sense of fun and dedication to their son.
“You would not know that [Edward was] on the verge of making the Olympic team,” McMurry says. Though the teen had a “fire in him,” he would just “put his head down … and stayed humble.”
“An amazing kid. His parents supported Eddie every step of the way,” McMurry says.
Like Edward’s coach, McMurry was also blindsided by news of the crash. Before bed, he had seen news of the collision but didn’t realize he knew seven of the people on the flight.
Then his phone started pinging in the middle of the night.
“There were messages of Facebook friends and such, hoping and praying that what they thought was true was not,” he says. “The skating community knew who was on the flight and social media is what keyed me in that there were figure skaters on the flight.”
As the Fairfax community reels, McMurry has decided to start a fundraiser in support of the Zhous’ extended family.
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“The whole immediate family was gone in a flash and their extended family had little or no relationship with the skating community,” says McMurry, who wanted to help serve as a bridge between the community and the family (his wife is from China and they both speak Mandarin).
On the GoFundMe page that McMurry started, he explains that donations will go to “essential expenses.” A memorial scholarship in Edward’s honor is also planned.
“The whole family is tragically lost,” says Sparger, Edward’s coach. “We have such a great community. Everybody has been so helpful and supportive through this whole horrible experience — this nightmare. It’s not just me, it’s the whole skating community.”
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