- nine

Being a parent makes you keenly aware of how your child progresses as they grow up through various ages. Without any hard or fast-cut transitions, a child gradually advances from one type of skating to another. A six year old is a considerably different skater than a four year old, but where that change happens chronologically is anybody's guess. But then you get to age 9.

9 is 9, and only a 9 year-old skates this way.

At 9 you are still a petite developing skater; unfortunately your lack of physical mass makes momentum and persistence difficult. Two strong strokes only get you about a third of the way down the ice. Holding a steady spiral is a real challenge. Skating when you are 9 requires tons, just enormous amounts of physical work.

Yet it's also really a special age; you are still normally proportioned, and you have enough grace and foot skills to accomplish most of what you desire. Your delicate physical mass won't interfere to cause inertial or balance issues: you look small, light, and clickety on your feet. You can almost exactly follow the music, you have a great imagination, and you are maturing past acting coy. You have a few favorite pop songs too. You are truly a princess on the ice.

Nine is the magical skating moment, but it doesn't last long.

- relief

A figure skating competition indulges many odd peripheral circuses that are only obliquely related to the competition itself. At the rink's entry you have the strangely dedicated volunteers attending to the entrance table, checking in competitors, gabbing about the inner club workings, or what they saw on TV last night. They are troopers.

Then you've got entryway vendors. It must be a peculiar lifestyle to travel around to various competitions selling gewgaw. There they sit or stand, in a borderland world all of their own making.

Then you have a handful of volunteer "runners" scheduled to shuffle the music and scores about the rink (well we did this a decade ago, but I see a lot less of this nowadays).

Once inside the rink you recognize the photo and film guys. Talk about a peculiar lifestyle (at least they get to view the events)! But they spend all of those hours upon weekend hours kneeling, bent, or leaning around in a cold rink.

Awards! The placement platform and award photographer! Standings and skating order sheets! Now step outside the rink again and notice the hospitality room for the coaches and judges.

Still the strangest place during a competition has to be the restrooms. Mind you it's not exactly a place where I "hang out" (and I speak only from the experience of stepping in for occasional relief). And of course I can only speak for the men's room.

What do you expect for a small place of semi-privacy and refuge in the midst of a milieu of anxious, harried competitors with complex costumes and extreme pressure? Contortioned costume changes, splashing the face with water, deep breathing, diarrhea, cursing, vomiting. I can only imagine what goes on over in the other female-half of the facility.

Now leave gently, sigh, put on your stage face, stretch, "relax," and go back to sit in the stands with the oblivious siblings and grandparents, or share a wide-eyed nod and acknowledgement of circumstances with the adjacent skate mom.

- ballet

Is ballet training a necessary ingredient to competitive figure skating? Perhaps. In an interesting post (from well over a couple of years ago!) Sheri says:

"For years skating coaches have been encouraging their skaters to take ballet classes to aid in the skater's on-ice performance. Ballet teachers spend hours teaching students correct ballet posture which is the same posture needed for skating. Ballet teaches the skater how to move the pelvis without losing balance or disconnecting the center in footwork sequences, including pirouette turns, jumps and leaps across the floor."

I think ballet augments your skating art in a few important areas. "Core" awareness (center of gravity control and fluidity), spine alignment, graceful movement, and "head attitude" are all valuable lessons that transfer well across the related disciplines. The actual physical application of these skills however when wearing skate boots is rather different than when wearing ballet slippers.

The trick therefore to successfully integrating your ballet lessons with your skating is to mentally grok the intent of the teaching but then to reapply and relearn those same lessons on the ice with your skates on. Ballet translates to the ice in theory, but not exactly in muscle memory. Too much ballet and you won't be able to skate, but if you fail to practice enough ballet you will look uncouth on the ice.

- love

A parent envelops a child with Love, and skating is also all about an observing, supporting, and softly critical Love. Sometimes these competing loves interact in a sublimely complicated fashion.

By the time your kid is seriously skating (say by age seven) life's circumstances have naturally ingrained your parental love: you have already internalized how to balance the love you share between your children, or between your child and a stranger. Occasionally issues arise, but for the most part you have already organically grown into handling them autonomously.

Now throw in the complications from skating love. Make no mistake about it, figure skating is a high love-required, high love-intensity sport. Similar to dancing, coaches have no other way to teach it and students have no other way to learn it except by the transmission of compressed thought packets in real time (okay, call it love then). Conveying a sense of aesthetic appreciation as well as the mechanical body dynamics necessary to cleanly execute a move both require love.

Coaches, parents, and skaters provide this love, and skaters demand tons of love while practicing. How you manage your love at the rink is probably a good half to three-quarters of the influence you have over the skating aspects of your child.

I hesitate to give specific advice for how to handle every situation: matters of your heart are for you and your own soul to resolve. I can however give you a heads-up for what you may need to consider.

At times your daughter may interact with the older skaters. Most of the time they are friendly yet detached; how should you behave if you feel they are acting inappropriately? When your daughter is in session with a coach she will be locked into the coach's love; what should you do in the meanwhile?

Your daughter may find herself in a group session, an ice theater or off-ice ballet, where she strives for attention with many others. How do you behave in this situation toward another hovering parent?

Skaters "clique" and your daughter may develop a close friendship to a couple of the skaters her age. How much do you allow her to dawdle and socialize?

Perhaps the biggest issue is that other serious skaters at the rink also crave your attention. Should you lock your eyes solely onto your own daughter alone?

Finally, as a loving parent, you have in your heart a certain life path you would like your child to follow. You would like to steer her clear from many pitfalls, and although you wish her success in her skating endeavors you also recognize that most of her future may not be about skating at all.

It helps to consider these things a bit before they spring upon you to cause unexpected stress. I'm not saying to be robotically clinical, just considerate. All of the parents at the rink are in the same boat; lead by setting a courteous and thought-through good example.

- 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