Those of you who have seen my posts in the other sections may or may not know that fairly new to Figure Skating, but have been training almost every day except Sunday since I started. Initially I just wanted to make a quick spreadsheet to keep track of what I've learned in relation to the Basic Skills guidelines on the USFSA website, however because I'm a full time student, and also work full time I decided it couldn't hurt to create a summary of exactly how much the sport has cost me financially, and how much it continues to cost me on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
I didn't really plan for this spreadsheet to become so detailed or complicated when I started, however now that the first version of it has been made I figured I'd share it with the community should there be other people around who are interested in keeping track of the same types of information. Since I made this sheet for myself, all of the information currently reflects my current totals, lessons, and Adult Basic Skills 1-4, but it should't be too difficult for someone to edit to suit their own levels and expenses. Feel free to do so.
Terms:
Learned - indicates exercises / moves that have been shown to me by my coach.
Mastered - indicates exercises / moves that are not difficult for me and are satisfactory to both me and my coach
First Day On the Ice - The exact date (entered in mm/dd/yyyy format) you began training regularly.
Start Up Costs - Are currently a sum total of Miscellaneous expenses and Equipment, I may change it later if I encounter an expense in one of these categories that is not start up related.
Percentage - An indicator of how far you have come in the different levels of Basic Skills. When all items at a given level have a 1 in both the "Learned" and "Mastered" column the percentage will become 100% indicating that there's nothing left for you to do at that level.
Notes:
- Your average monthly/weekly/daily costs will likely be much higher if you JUST started due to start up costs, and frequency/intensity of instruction. For example, in my case my coach and I agreed that it would be better to start with longer more frequent lessons to establish a foundation quickly, so that I could become self sufficient enough to practice by myself outside of lessons. As such the average monthly costs are higher now than they will be in 6 months when we no longer meet either as frequently or as long as we do now.
- If you are like me and have not even been skating a full month yet, your averages may be somewhat askew depending on how you are billed for ice time and lessons. As above this will level out once you have been skating a few months.
- ONLY put 1s in the boxes for items that you have learned / mastered, using numbers of letters will mess up the calculations
- If you have a 1 in the "Mastered" column you MUST have a 1 in the "Learned" column also to be counted as completing that exercise completely
- I have not made the sheet smart enough to account for periods of absence. It is possible to do, but it is not something that impacts my skating, and I didn't exactly intend for this to become a huge project when I started.
Microsoft Excel is required. I used 2003 to make it, so it should work on newer versions of Excel, however I do not know about older versions or 3rd party Excel clones like OpenOffice.
I've just realized that I have no way to attach the spreadsheet to this message so I will reply to my own thread once I find a quick and free web site to host it.