DEERFIELD — When the New England West Skating Club hosted its yearly exhibition at the Deerfield Academy ice rink on Saturday night, the skaters performed not only for a crowd of family members and friends, but to honor the figure skaters who died in the Jan. 29 American Airlines crash in Washington D.C.

The Olympic figure skating pair Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov were among the 67 people who perished in the disaster. To skating fans, Shishkova and Naumov were the 1994 World Championship winners. To Suzanne McCaughtry, a Keene, New Hampshire resident and director of the New England West Skating Club, they were mentors.

Before she started teaching skaters in Greenfield and then Deerfield, McCaughtry ice danced in her hometown of Simsbury, Connecticut, where she worked with Shishkova and Naumov. When the pair took their training to the Skating Club of Boston, McCaughtry kept in touch, traveling with her students to their rink. There, her skaters learned from their lessons and McCaughtry learned from their approach.

Although she admired both skaters, McCaughtry said she was closer with Naumov.

“He’s so kind and caring,” she said, still using the present tense. “He’s an Olympic champion himself, but he’ll work with any level skater because of the love he has for the sport. He and his wife, it pours out of them.”

McCaughtry, the announcer at Saturday’s exhibition, often invited the decorated couple’s son, three-time U.S. national pewter medalist Maxim Naumov, to perform solo skates in her yearly exhibitions since “he was about this high,” McCaughtry said, her hand at her hip.

She invited guest skaters from the Skating Club of Boston and Champions Skating Center in Cromwell, Connecticut, to skate their separate programs and join the local skaters for a tribute performance. The exhibition served as “a tribute to the two most devastating accidents that have had the most profound impact on the sport of figure skating,” McCaughtry wrote on the back page of Saturday’s event program — honoring the 28 members of the figure skating community who died in the Jan. 29 crash, as well as the U.S. Figure Skating Team that perished in a 1961 plane crash.

“In a powerful testament to resilience and unity, some of those who once stood beside them — friends, teammates and loved ones — are here with us tonight, skating in their memory,” McCaughtry wrote. “They remind us that even in the face of profound loss, we are never truly alone. The bonds built on the ice, in moments of triumph and hardship alike, are unbreakable.”

After skaters twisted and posed to pop anthems like “Disco Inferno” and “Shake It Off” while the crowd clapped along, the rink stilled to silence for the tribute finale.

In the dim lighting, Leo Ribaudo, a teen figure skater from Skating Club of Boston, glided alone on the ice to “Rise” by Michael W. Smith. With a solemn expression and a candle in each hand, he then looked to the rest of the night’s performers as they skated in a circle around him.

The other guest skaters and Champions Skating Center coach Svetlana Kulikova, who worked with the late Shishkova and Naumov for years in Simsbury with McCaughtry, then broke from the circle. While Smith sang, “Come and stand / And join with me as one / Now take my hand and we / Will rise above,” they joined Ribaudo at the center of the rink. Candles against their chests, the group looked out to the audience as the song came to an end.

“I lost a lot of friends in the flight, a lot of close friends,” Ribaudo said after the exhibition. For him and his friend who choreographed the tribute, his two candles were more than a prop.

“For me, two candles means a lot,” he said. Ribaudo explained that the number represented the aircraft (one plane and one helicopter) involved in the collision; his two closest friends, figure skaters Jinna Han and Spencer Lane, who died in the crash; and his coaches, Shishkova and Naumov.

“So I said to myself, ‘Alright, well, I also have two hands,’” Ribaudo recalled. “So I’m going to start with two candles, and I’m going to put them together into one, but then bring them back out to show that there were two separate people that were close in one sport that brought us all together.”

College student and U.S. Figure Skating Championships pairs skater Michela Melillo described the final moment of the tribute as unifying.

“It just felt like coming together,” Melillo said.

For a sport that requires hours of intense private lessons on the rink, moments of community like Saturday’s exhibition are crucial, according to McCaughtry.

“We live in the rink,” said Kulikova, Melillo’s coach. “It’s a lifestyle. Some people don’t take it seriously sometimes, but it’s really, really hard work.”

She and the guest skaters described the performers, coaches and their loved ones as a traveling family, with Kulikova gesturing to the parents waiting to hand their kids bouquets.

Karl Schapfel, Melillo’s pairs partner, sees the exhibitions as a gift of gratitude to his parents who make his skating possible.

“They don’t really see that much of what goes on inside the rink,” Schapfel said. “The performances are our way to show them.”

McCaughtry added that the club plans exhibitions and group programs “to pull people together.” “When it’s a single skater, it’s a lonesome sport.”

“You come, you get your skates on, you skate, you take your skates off, you leave,” longtime Deerfield resident and adult group skater Margaret Ferry said, describing her private lessons.

An endocrinologist, Ferry joined the adult group 10 years ago for the “giggly fun.”

“Everybody comes from a different place,” she explained. “We’re all from different worlds, but we all value a skill and trying.”