Does that rule mean your specific coach, or is it just that some coach has to be out there in order for skaters to be out there? It sounds very unfair to skaters either way. So does the rink cancel FS sessions if no coach shows up that day? If so, that's just crazy or stupid. Is there a FS session monitor there? At the rink here, people skate all the time without coaches on the ice, but we do have a FS monitor.
Any coach. Patch (practice ice) sessions are run by the "skating school" ie the coaches, rather than the rink so you need one (or more) of them have to be present in order to be covered by the coaches insurance. There are no rink or music monitors. There are around a dozen coaches though many are part-time.
The busy weekend and evening sessions always run fine, as do 95% of the term-time weekday early (before school) sessions. My coach usually gives me a heads up if no-one is going to be around (ie so I can't practice before my lesson).
The skate school often runs a "beginners" patch late morning in the school holidays so many coaches rearrange their lessons so they don't have too many gaps in the run up to that (and few want to get up early if they don't need to!) so they simply aren't usually around earlier. My coach is expecting me to be the 1st in on Tuesdays so I will have max 10 mins warm up + lesson then need to leave for work unless I go into work later (possible but depends on what I'm up to at work that day!). Early patch still ran most Fridays last year (after the rink refit) as there were a few adults looking for early patch for lessons/ practice and the head coach came in with several of her higher level skaters (so they could have uninterrupted lessons and program run throughs on quiet non kid filled ice
) so the rink was opened ~7ish. Hopefully that is the case this year too. We'll see.