A few years ago, a young Leah Keiser was watching the U.S. Figure Skating Junior Championships and asking Nancy Kerrigan for her autograph.

Last weekend, this 10-year-old Marshall Township resident was accepting a gold medal from Kerrigan after winning the national championship in her division -- Juvenile Girls -- the USFSA's Junior Championships in Salt Lake City, Utah, the site of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.

Keiser scored a 50.01 to win the Juvenile Girls Division against 17 other competitors on Nov. 30. She beat the second- and third-place scores of 49.38 and 46.35 from junior skaters from Maryland and Dallas.

It was another U.S. female figure skater who caught Keiser's attention early on. When she was 4 years old, she watched Michelle Kwan compete in the Salt Lake Olympics and was immediately interested in figure skating. After first hitting the ice at Blade Runners, Keiser made the choice to pursue figure skating competitively.

"I remember watching Michelle Kwan skate on TV and I wanted to start skating. I was eager to do it," said Leah, who just turned 10 in September. "It was really exciting but it was pretty hard to balance at first."

She has gotten past the balancing part and in her winning routine in Salt Lake City, she landed a double Lutz to a loop and attempted a double flip-double toe-double loop set.

Leah left Bradford Woods Elementary in the North Allegheny School District and enrolled in cyber school last December. She was a straight-A student at Bradford Woods and scored in the 98th percentile when she took the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment exam. Her mother, Betty, and her sister, Emily, 8, have been traveling with her around the country.

"Going to cyber school, she misses the playground with her friends but she has other kids in the rink to skate with," Betty said from California where Leah is preparing to skate in some holiday shows.

"She was very clear that she wanted to figure skate. If she wanted to improve, she had to make the next step and she did. She wants to go to the Olympics and be a champion."

Betty talked of the sacrifice the family has made to follow Leah around the country. She and her other daughter, who left Bradford Woods in second grade to join cyber school, too, have been traveling with her around the country.

Before competing in the Junior Nationals, they traveled to other cities such as Portland, Dallas and St. Louis so Leah could watch others compete in championships.

The magnitude of the event in Salt Lake City hit Leah when she saw the skaters post-routine area.

"She was always saying her dream was to sit at 'the kiss-and-cry area' and once she saw it, she knew she was a big competitor," Betty Keiser said. "She was always winning so we knew she was going to medal [at Salt Lake City]. It was really sweet for her to go out there and get the gold."

Leah originally trained in Pittsburgh with Caryn Kadavy and Liz Leary before heading to the West Coast to train where Kwan used to train.

"Michelle [Kwan] became her role model," Betty said. "She wanted to come to California to see where Michelle trained."

She is currently training out of the All Year Figure Skating Club in Culver City, Calif., with Tammy Gambill.

"[Tammy] is really good and I don't think we could find any person better than her if I wanted to be a good skater," Leah said.