- 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.

- grlz

So you see there are the skategirls, and then there are the skategrlz. The skategirls are soft and beautiful and hopeful, have doting parents and new tights, new soakers, and a perfectly clean club warmup sweatshirt with added sparkly crystals, and they're at the rink as much as possible to be the best skaters they can be. The skategrlz are tough as nails, have tape on their boots, a colorful funky warmup that they found in a thrift store, and they go to the rink as much as possible to get away from school and home. Both the girls and the grlz skate the bejeebers out of themselves and fall often enough on the hard ice to get calloused hips. They both curse their frustrations.

To the skategirls each additional element is increasingly unfair, and since somebody else in the freestyle can land it so easily, naturally even, it is sooo frustrating. They persevere though, and realize that enough practice likely can catch up with natural talent. To the skategrlz each additional element is just another experience to conquer, and life is frustrating enough already so what's one more brick on the pile? And who knows... they may have the correct body build and natural talent for this move so it's about time they got lucky.

When skatergirls land a tough move it's all smiles and sparklies and thanks so much for the help coach and god bless my parents (and I knew if I practiced this long enough I could nail it). When skatergrlz land a tough move it's hot damn that felt so good (did you see that hockey guy?) and this will show them what I'm made of.

After many years of skating the girls and the grlz slowly migrate toward each other. The girls recognize fate or genetics prevents some things, and start to accept that life's road is bumpy for everyone. The grlz start to appreciate the politeness and fashion sense absorbed from their peers as it pays off in other ways in their life.

- ends

Hmmm, we seem to have a slight disconnect between what you think brackets your program and what little old me in the audience thinks. The previous skater steps off the ice, you step on and wait patiently by the dasher as the judges finish their scoring. Maybe you stretch a bit or skate a small three turn.

Then when the referee signals and they announce you skate out to assume your initial pose. Yeah this is where *you* think you are starting. So you skate your four minutes; final pose. Yeah I know, this is where you think your program ends. You smile and curtsey the four quadrants, skate a lap to pick up the flowers or stuffed bears on the ice, and then glide to the dasher exit.

To little old me though your program started the moment your toe pick crossed from rubberized floor to ice. And it wasn't all the way over until after you left the ice to hug your coach.

I full well recognize that the judges don't care, but out here in the audience some of us view your skate to center ice before posing as part of your professionalism. It's probably not that much effort to be sharp.

And that curtsey and admiration vacuum? You are enjoying a special privilege in a privileged world (perhaps you should be humble, graceful, and thankful).

And God bless you.

- expectations

The moms of competitive skaters see each other at the same time every day to share a similar routine. They have a certain unspoken posture about them -- not only do they support a competitive skater with the intentional characteristics of overlapping muses but they also share quite similar home lives. Severely isolated from standard workaday corporate ladies they build their own castle in the sky of who said what or how the club is fairing or how they feel about traveling to the next competition. Essentially they all share similar jobs.

Most of the rink smalltalk about coaches or equipment transpires between the moms when their kids are little and approaching harness jumping. Skates and blades and coaches and costume (and all of that) get fully talked through and settled into quiet understanding before their kids are 10. When you go to a freestyle of juniors the moms are verbally silent, having already discussed the mundane nuances of the sport amongst themselves many years ago. Naturally at this point they are quite a bit noisier mentally, and given the time they have previously invested they harbor more severe expectations.

Some of this gets flittered out when the gals clear the ice for the periodic zamboni. It's just natural that moms will chat with their kids about how they're feeling with their skating and give rather pointed remarks as to technique, or encouragement when elements are behaving strangely. You don't hear a lot of talk about "What did your coach say" as moms purposefully aim their freestyle parental time in a different direction than what the coach says.

Some of this is normal childrearing behavior of a mom raising an erudite teen girl (mom is applying various degrees of pressure to her teen daughter). The skater understands how her body reacts to the ice and the sociology of her fellow skaters. She feels supported by her coach and can do no harm within the context of trying her best given the vagaries of ice, feelings, body variance, and how her boots fit today. The mom though often has loftier objectives since she is aware of the cost. Additionally mom and daughter span a wide gap of life perspective (after all the mother has already been through childbirth).

A subtext of this happens whether your child skates or not: a parent is imminently interested in the future success of her child. Many moms are contemplating where their kid will end up in ten years. A skater is looking ahead to the next year at most. In other words their vision of the kid's timeline is very different.

To facilitate communication a parent parses their longer range expectations into terms of shorter one-year objectives that the child can digest. Conflict nestles within the demands of higher perfection inherent within the longer timeline. With only a vision extended to a single year, a skater thinks Hey if I'm a little bit off on this move it won't be a big deal because there's a good chance that I'll straighten it out by the end of the year when I'm ready to advance. The parent though sees compounding shortfalls of immaturity; compared to their mind's eye view of where their skater should be in ten years, each deficit in skill or grace appears as a worsening obstacle that gets piled onto the perfection they would eventually like their kid to achieve. Few parents set out to spend thousands of dollars just to have their kid have fun on the ice for a decade.

- stolen

Compared to the relaxed standing around and lollygagging at your typical weekday Freestyle practices, every competition or showcase event I've been to has always been the epitome of high stress and hectic. Most of this I presume has to do with their relentless schedule -- pretty much everything is planned to the minute, and if you're late then you've missed your event. Everything seems to be tied into this mississippian flow: cars are constantly shuttling in and out of the parking lot, music and registration is a continuous roller coaster at the front check-in, judges are up and down between their scoring stations and hospitality, coaches are checking in and out and mentally checking their internal schedule, the Zamboni driver takes breaks and then wanders back in to resurface at precisely the right time, and the camera and video crews peek ahead to find the next potty or coffee break.

Although it's hectic, skating events are still incurably slow. If you want to catch a fair amount of representative performances you pretty much have to stick around the rink for half of a day's competition. The stressed out drama of the event slowly wears you down with its small catastrophes until you are forced into a trance, and then whamo! out comes a skater in perfect costume with absolute grace who will hypnotically steal your heart.