- friction

No matter how involved a skating parent nor how proficient a coach and her staff, you're still going to find some friction between a parent and the coach. The basis for this is joint and several.

Some is the natural conflict inherent in loco parentis where every day a coach temporarily transmits some of her value system to a student. Some of it may be a lingering suspicion from the parent that the coach's goals don't align exactly with her own. Some of it may strictly be a cost/benefit complaint. Some of it may be disdain toward the lack of authority or control the parent has over the coach (who appears to primarily be an employee of the rink).

At the foundational level though, all this appears to mostly result from a complicated "agency" problem: several parties stand between the service provider (coach) and the buyer (parent). Analogous to how companies buy health insurance for their employees, a parent buys coaching for her child. This transaction is not perfectly transparent however: few parents comprehend the intricacies of skating and the communication between a parent and her child are often less than clairvoyant.

There also seems to be a moral hazard always lurking beneath the surface: is the coach actually managing your child strictly to retain a long term client? Is that in your child's best interest? Does the coach give you false hopes of grandeur in return for a longer lasting revenue stream? In other words is the best interest of your skating child at odds with the best interests of her coach?

A parent of a serious skater may need to consider how to incentivize her kid's coaches to achieve the skater's desired results. Should you tip your coach for exceptional accomplishments? Should you have a contract with your kid's coach with performance incentives? Should we be encouraging skate parents to share their feelings about the quality of their coaches?

Yeah it's a lot of questions and I don't know any of the answers. Frankly a parent can be a bit of a cad to bring these up in public to begin with. Still it's something to think about (and perhaps discuss on blogs or on skating forums).

- pushing

A time-intensive and physically demanding relationship would seem to be at a rather high risk for conflict. It's quite like being in an apprenticeship. I am pleased that my daughter had a gentle coach (at least as far as I know, as I preferred to stay attached loosely to avoid any overt meddling).

When performing the mentally and physically demanding task of skating, a skater can certainly be distracted and thrown off kilter by the daily variations in her moods and muscles. What if the coach asks your kid to do something and she's simply not feeling up to it that day? How much should the coach push, and how much should your skater push back? Who knows the best of what a skater is capable of, the skater or her coach? Who should decide the daily level of impetus -- and does the parent have a say in this?

Is there a good match between assertiveness in this relationship? Katarina (in her book on the subject) was actually pleased that her coach was stubbornly bossy and a hard driver.

Yet I saw one survey quoted that said "Only 7% of girls said coaches should be most concerned with winning" (although this survey was based upon a casual sport, something like softball I believe). I sense that skating kids have a different viewpoint than those participating in casual sports. Still though I would guess a good half of the skaters I'd see at freestyles don't really have intentions of ever competing beyond locally.

Here's a great page that describes many of the desirable characteristics of a coach. I'd grant a fair amount of leeway in each trait, and frankly the field you get to choose from is narrowed to those coaches taking new students at your rink. Bottom line: how you manage how pushy you allow (or choose) your coach to be depends a lot on your's and your skater's goals, considered together.

- choose

How does a skater go about choosing a coach? Seldom do I pen a blog post I know nothing about, yet this is definitely one of those times.

When my daughter started skating around age six, she attended group classes and then had a coach from one of her former class teachers (at least if I recall correctly, it was a long time ago). Then when she was around ten she let me know two amazing things: she was so serious about skating that 1. she wanted to home school, and 2. she was going to pick a new coach. How?

Well she had already talked to her mom who was exploring the home schooling, and she had chatted with several friends at the rink and doing some research to decide which coach to pick.

When your ten year old daughter lets you know she is making such major choices it can be a bit disconcerting. But I trusted her mom with her concern for my daughter's education, and even at ten my daughter knew about twenty times more about skating than me, so I figured she'd make better coaching choices.

We live in what I suppose Xan would call a smallish market; although LA has twelve million people, we could only really drive to around eight rinks. Our rinks are sparse, so a kid has a limited number of choices. Plus I sense that out here the rink a toddler first attends for group classes tends to become her Home rink (although this may just be a Southwest U.S. sort of thing).

So really my daughter was choosing between the three or four coaches at Pickwick who were taking on new charges.

When I checked with her my daughter said that she didn't remember a lot about the process; she wanted a coach that was not too mean (screeching at their students while they ran through a program), and one that was able to teach her students to learn jumps beyond the Axel.

I'm curious to hear how other parents and skaters go about this process. Overall I think our coach worked out well, yet I recognize since this decision happens at an early age and can have such lasting impact that it's a difficult decision to make well.

- adults

When you are raising kids, one of your larger concerns is how to choose the quality of the adults that they get exposed to. For most parents a lot of this concern gets played out in the evaluations they go through when choosing a school for their kids. It also influences the types of friends you encourage them to hang out with: by association the attitudes of their parents filter through their kids. When your kid attends school, they get a new teacher every year, and once they reach middle school they get several teachers every day, and then a whole new slew each semester. In total your kids tend to spend more time with adults who are teachers than with their own parents.

When your child skates competitively though the only adults she spends a lot of time with are her coach and perhaps her ballet teacher. These usually remain the same people year after year. Choosing the coach that matches the personality of your kid and likewise meets your desires for the proper role model therefore gets to be a bigger deal.

Oddly, skating or coaching ability tends to fall out of the equation; unless your kid has demonstrated national abilities at an early age, any coach you choose from the rink who has skated competitively herself and who is a member of PSA will have adequate skating skills to teach for local competitions. Therefore spend a bit of time when your kid is little to soak in how the coaches interact with their students, from a personality perspective. You are choosing those ideals in an adult mentor that will serve your child well beyond her skating career.

- blue and gold

When you spend a lot of time at the rink with your kid, you also get to spend loads of time with both her peers and the skating coaches. While sitting quietly and watching the interaction of brains, the flow of love, you will find that the coaches have quite a different dynamic from the skaters.

The skaters feel exciting: they are exploring the new moves, emotions, and feelings attached at the edge of their envelope. They are observing, absorbing, and showing off a bit. They are learning both physical and social skills. They can see and imagine a future path to some glory and critical attention.

The coaches on the other hand watch the skaters with the quiet reserve of a teacher's eye, also with both some nostalgia and some pathos. For many of them watching a student brings back memories of a heartbreak. Or you may see a half smile fleetingly cross her face as a flashy student maneuver reminds the coach of one of the high points of her previous skating career.

Many times a coach will fall into a quiet glumness, realizing that she is "stuck" coaching, that her students' glamour is ahead of them but that her own is behind, that as a coach she is a cog in the process of growing teens. Coaches recognize the actual future of their students and how different it will turn out from their students' dreams.

If not for the love from their students, a coach would mostly prevail through a melancholy life.

(repost)

- factors

Does it really take a specific coach to create a skater of national quality? When I evaluate all of the growth factors that I attribute to a skater, a coach, a ballet teacher and the skater's parents, I'm somewhat unsure that the coach contributes as large an impact as we all think. If I were to graph it piechart-wise I'd say Primary Coach: 20%; Specialty coaches (combined total from 4 of them): 25%; Involved parent: 15%.

Gee that only adds up to sixty. And the remainder? Yeah a full 40% is solely due to the natural abilities, the developed skills, the dedication, the body build, and the injury avoidance of the skater herself.

What's the difference then on the actual development of a skater overall between the best possible and the typical average coach? Well if the worst coach is zero and the best is 20%, then from average to best works out to half of that, or around ten percent. Heck yeah at the elite level this is tremendous, but at the local competitive level guess what? It's mostly irrelevant as it becomes overwhelmed by the other factors.

Now mind you I'm not saying that you can get by with a coach that is a competent lout. You should strive to find a primary coach that your daughter finds *inspiring*; this is the key trait to discover, and it involves having that right "chemistry" between your skater and her coach.

Make sure your skater is comfortable with her everyday coach, but as long as the coach is competent and inspiring don't fret if she's not the best at the rink.

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Bonus: check out this retrograde duck: pretty much impossible on the ice, but on wheels.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-sAJ2PBFBI