- ten

In an earlier post I chatted a bit about the wonderful thrill you experience skating as a 9 year old. Well, that only last's a year. Once you cross over to ten you're in a new country.

Ten has to be the most mentally challenging part of any skater's life. Suddenly (and it seems for without any special reason) everything you learned about skating turns inside out. Most of this is a direct result of a young teen's spurt in the growth of her long bones, those components of the arms and legs.

Just when you were getting exactly comfortable with the vertical location of your center of gravity and the correlations between arm location and spin velocity, suddenly it all starts changing. Now on a scratch spin when you pull in your arms not only do you spin twice as fast but you wobble like crazy. A higher center of gravity will do that to you, and it demands a real focused attention to posture.

Stroking starts to get more interesting though; suddenly you can actually get places with considerably less effort. Flying around the rink can be quite fun, if a little scary. Hence ten is when you make intimate acquaintance with the dasher boards. Maybe twice even. After that I assure you they stand out loud and clear.

Due to these changes, ten is also where perhaps two remarkable mental realizations occur. The first is a deep conceptual understanding of how angular momentum actually relates to velocity and ice leverage. The second is social awareness; looking around the rink a ten year old recognizes that she is suddenly approaching the middle of her skating career. It becomes time to consider how serious you really are about this figure skating thing.

Oh to live on sugar mountain, with the 9 year olds and colored balloons.

- 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.

- timing

As if it's not already difficult enough to perform jumps on ice and be expressive and graceful, for a further challenge you need to time your program to the music!

Of course it's easier to match the rhythm when the music is something more free flowing and without a drum downbeat. Hence it's easier to "match" a dramatic program to a classical piece than to skate a light entertainment routine to a pop song. And I rather doubt how much a person can develop "rhythm" in the first place; it seems to me for the most part that you either have it or you don't.

Is it okay to sing along with your music on a light entertainment program to help you keep pace with the music? Although it may assist with staying synchronized, mouthing lyrics distracts you from your ability to use your body as an expressive outlet. It also somewhat detracts from your grace: viewers will be drawn to your jabbering jaw rather than your hands and limbs. Better not to sing along.

It's a pain to have to split your attention between concentrating on your moves and timing them to the music. A better approach may be to establish mileposts: know that at a certain inflection point of the music you are supposed to be at a specific element of your program, and then make speed adjustments accordingly.

Not only is a skater supposed to stay on the beat but somehow she must additionally finish her skating when the music concludes! To end gracefully plan for a few seconds of "dramatic escape" at the tail end of your routine. How much slack should you allow? If you leave too much emptiness hanging then it's obvious that you're just spinning time at the end.

Judging from the nice endings I've seen I'd say give yourself around five seconds of free ad-lib to finish. Then develop a couple alternate flourishes to use if you're running either short or long. As you approach the end of a program it's far easier to manage some extra embellishments on an early finish than to skate into the deathly silence beyond the music.

- etiquette

The local mixed-club events can be a bit frustrating, not so much for the jumble of skills and age groups but rather for the disarray of parental experience in competitive viewing etiquette. Basically you've got a slew of grandparents and non-skating siblings bumbling about in the stands and walkways.

I've never seen this coped with completely gracefully; I wonder if it would help if the USFSA required all their sanctioned events to have an Etiquette Flyer passed out to the non-skating audience. It might read something like this:

"Welcome to the [event name]! This event is sanctioned by the USFSA; for any comments or concerns, please visit us at usfsa.org. We would like to remind you that a couple days after the event finishes you may view all results at [club website].

While in attendance we ask that you adhere to these common courtesies:

1. Cell phones on vibrate please. Take your call outside or wait for the next resurfacing. 2. Please wait for the break between skaters before you walk in front of the stands. 3. Please reign in small children; they may crave attention but this moment is really about their big sister on the ice. 4. Refrain from eating in the stands except during the group warmups and resurfacing. 5. No flash pictures. 6. Keep the chatter down. 7. You may yell and cheer when your kid or her club mates take the ice, but during the skating only applause is appropriate. 8. Please be careful climbing and descending the grandstand stairs. 9. It would be really nice if you could stick around through a few flights after your child's event. 10. The far side of the rink is for skaters, coaches, and judges only.

Thanks again for supporting all of our wonderful skaters, and enjoy the competition!"

Is that maybe too much to ask?

- jump aesthetics

In my series of posts about the elements I have been abiding by the aesthetic audience member's point of view, so when I watch your jumps in the context of how impressive they appear in your program, this post is about what I am looking for. Yeah yeah I know toe loops are different than salchows are different than lutz and axels: it's about the edge and foot you take off from, forward or backward, rotations, blah blah blah (see my quick guide here). I fully appreciate they have different physics, demands and difficulties, and you have to learn each one separately. Out here in the audience though I'm a couple steps removed from all that so my viewpoint is rather different than yours.

First and foremost, I'm looking for some consistency in your takeoffs. I am really less concerned if you two-foot or slightly over or under-rotate as long as the angle you left the ice prevented you from having a "lean vector" during your spin in the air. It's nice if your angle is near vertical but if it's only a tad tilted I don't mind as long as that angle itself stays fixed until you land.

I do want to see a variety of jumps, in terms of salchow lutz loop axel. Nowadays competitors embellish this with a bit of arm variety (one or both up overhead) on a couple of their jumps, but most of your jumps should be standard squeezed in arms. If you nailed the landing then how you check leaves an impression on me too (but not in the way you think... we'll get to that in a moment).

I like to see an appropriate parabolic arc to your jump: it should have some horizontal movement along with the up and down. If you land in the same place you took off then it looks like off-ice practice. If you travel too far though then your arc looks "flat" and it also scares me (falls on a long-travel jump tend to be particularly nasty).

Depending on the level you are skating I want to see level-appropriate combos and jump difficulty. This means juniors and seniors: your single (non combo) jumps after your first thirty seconds of program should be a triple or better. You can do a couple of non-combo jumps but the rest should be combinations of some sort. Nowadays I see most senior skaters do a triple-combo but it seems rather strange: nobody has enough momentum left after the second jump in their combo to do their third part with any skillful gracefulness. If you can though, more power to you. If all three of the jumps in your combo took off from the same location on the ice then don't bother.

More than any of the other elements, the impression you want to leave me with on your jumps is one of graceful professionalism. I am fully mentally connected to you as you prep, jump, and land. I see what you're thinking on the way in, I don't want you to telegraph, I want you to attempt the jump you're supposed to, I want to see consistency and confidence, and on your check I don't want to see you express either disappointment nor celebration. I want it to be, in other words, proof you nearly always make this jump and you've more or less mastered it.