I hesitated to post on this very important thread because of a year and half of frustration as a Club Pres/Membership Chair trying to “grow” the figure skating program at my rink. I will try to restrain myself from venting too much.
It appears I'm right down the road from you. We should get coffee sometime and vent together.
My rink is seasonal, so any efforts to grow figure skating are halted when the rink closes for the summer and families have to drive an hour to skate. An amazing number do make the drive at least once a week, but some don't, and they get involved with other things, and skating becomes less important and less worth the money and effort when the rink does open again.
I asked a couple of hockey players if the rink being closed in the summer was disruptive to them, and they said, not really, because it's actually good in the development of a hockey player to take a break from the ice and do other sports or training in the summer.
So, when the rink opens, we have hardly anyone at freestyle, and hockey has a packed roomful of people at their interest sessions. Not a great incentive to give us freestyle time.
Hockey is redneck, and this is Virginia. People, especially boys and men, are naturally drawn to sports where it's OK to make noise, hit each other and drink beer and belch afterwards. Compare the popularity of watching football to ballet. The big college teams here can draw 63,000 people to a game at $40-$50 a person. The ballet company in the city where I grew up can't sell out a 5,000-seat auditorium.
USFS isn't doing a great job of communicating the basics of the sport to parents and people interested in skating, and this miscommunication trickles down to the club level. Search the U.S. Figure Skating site for info and you're likely to get a bunch of 100-page PDFs in the results. It's discouraging to people who might be interested in starting lessons or otherwise don't have a coach to guide them.
I think our club and coaches do a great job of getting figure skaters to join. Pretty much everyone at our rink who takes private lessons is a member. We don't have group lessons beyond delta, so you have to go private if you want to go beyond that, but a lot of beginners end up in private lessons too.
But it's bringing in the skaters in the first place and then keeping them skating that's a problem. The bottom line is that even if your kid only takes one half-hour private lesson a week and practices for another hour a week, that's still a minimum of about $150 a month, not to mention the cost of skates and club membership and the Chloe Noel pants your kid is going to beg for. A lot of people just can't do it. If we want to grow figure skating, we have to figure out how to make it cheaper and then convince rink owners they can make money off options like more advanced group lessons.