Skating Etiquette Article (Jimmy Santee, PSA Magazine)

[fsk8r]

Most skaters develop a rather pavlovian response to our (very few) high level skaters program music though - opening bars = bail for barrier even if you are mid lesson! It is chaos when one of them has new music!

I seem to have developed the same pavlovian response. It doesn't help that one coach gets her skaters to flip their programs around so just when you think the double lutz is at one end of the rink, it suddenly appears at the other. And for those skaters which have their music overplayed the most, the pavlovian response remains for when the next kid starts to reuse it and I have to train it out when I learn that the next kid won't try to kill me.

[Icicle]

I wonder if those rules only apply to freestyle sessions. How about public sessions?

[AgnesNitt]

I wonder if those rules only apply to freestyle sessions. How about public sessions?

Public ice has its own set of rules. I know people try to use it as cheap freestyle ice, but really, locally except for mid-week public, and the first hour of summer eveing public, the rink is too crowded.
I used to take lessons on public, then aftr a while I realizd I was spending too much time waiting for a spot to clear, Freestyle may be busy, but by god people  know the rules and they're polite.  The only freestyle skaters on public locally are a handful of young kids and some determined adults.

[jjane45]

Public ice has its own set of rules. I know people try to use it as cheap freestyle ice...

When convenient, I still use the middle coned off areas of public sessions for practice, and it's almost like the freestyle rules except well it's only 1/3 in area and obviously no one runs program music. Spins in the center, jumps on the ends. Some kids can only jump around the middle circle and it frustrates me.

[treesprite]

5 pages!

My rink has 1 very small paragraph! It can be summarised by:
- patch (practice ice) must be booked 48 hrs in advance. (This point takes up most of the paragraph!)
- be polite and watch out for other skaters.
- no chatting on the ice.
- there must be a coach on the ice in order for you to be allowed to skate.

Ermmm, that is pretty much it! There are no designated jumping or spinning areas. It works well on the quieter sessions I skate, though the "there must be a coach on the ice" rule is a nightmare sometimes if my coach is away and during school holidays. Summer holidays start in a couple of days so my available practice time is about to plummet as the kids (and consequently coaches) come in later - too late for me to do anything other than just my lesson before work.

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.   

[blue111moon]

My club does not allow coaches to instruct more than two skaters at a time during one lesson on club ice.  Three or more constitutes a group and group lessons are restricted to group lesson time.  We did have one non-home club coach who tried to coach three sisters at one time;  the girls were not all on the same level and two were beginners and not aware of traffice patterns at all.  It was chaos.

The only exception to this is when a coach might have three to five skaters entering a team event where each skater does a different jump or spin.  Then the week before the competition, the coach may take the group through the elements and decide who does what.  That only lasts about ten minutes, though and causes very little disruption.

[taka]

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.