June 2008
First Two Weeks of June 2008
Didn’t Bring My Skates
Usually I take a pair of skates with me almost everywhere I go. However, for this visit to my father, I left the skates at home. Although there is an ice rink with good cheap sessions about fifteen minutes from his house, I needed a break; not only from skating but also from the high cost of driving around. I decided to stay at the house and take walks with the dog instead.
Being an instructor puts a certain amount of pressure on me to maintain my skills. This can quickly drain the joy from skating. I just needed a couple of weeks with absolutely no reason to go to a rink. I did not have to teach a class or a private student, and I did not feel guilty about missed practice or limbering my bad ankle for crossovers. I felt free as a bird without a big block of ice hanging over my head. I walked everyday. I walked everywhere I went, often with the dog in tow. I read four books and did a lot of sewing. I have not sewn a stitch in close to two years. The change was good for me. I will probably return to skating refreshed.
On one of my walks, I visited the high school jogging track. Both the school and track were built within the last five years. School is out for the season, but someone left hurdles in various states of disarray scattered around the track. The asphalt at the ends of the track has heaved and cracked allowing weeds to spring forth. Judging by the height and vigor of the greenery, no one has made any recent effort to trim the growth. That track is not old enough to be circling the drain. For a moment, I wished I had brought my roller skates. I would like to speed skate around that oval, avoiding the hazardous weeds and cracks, of course. My father reported that the community is building a new track funded by donations. That’s fine, but why let a perfectly good facility lie in abandonment unless it is scheduled for demolition?
Other than that passing whim, I did not miss skating. Distance roller skating is a different beast altogether from freestyle ice skating. It does not place the same emotional and performance-oriented pressures on me. Skating around that track on wheels would have been purely for exercise rather than practice. It was nice not to have to practice. Now I understand why even elites take time off between seasons.
Week of June 15, 2008
Galina Wannabe
I started teaching at another rink that I will call Oak Ridge Arena***. My first coaching stint actually occurred at Oak Ridge over four years ago. Since then the place closed, changed hands, and reopened under new management. At the time, I was not sufficiently recovered from my ankle injury to return to coaching. Finally, they had an opening and I got in. Their enrollment is so low, I doubt I will get rich teaching there. In my opinion, the place has never been well managed. It is primarily a hockey rink, and they offer very limited public skating and no freestyle at all. They do not advertise and can barely support a learn-to-skate program. Furthermore, no one seems to care one way or the other. They just close the rink and turn off the lights to save money rather than trying to increase business.
Since I have been spending more time in rinks as a coach rather than a skater, I have noticed peculiarities in coaching staff. Elite Arena seemed to prefer to hire teenagers to teach groups. Or maybe only teenagers could tolerate the skating director’s crap. Adult pros ran like rats from a sinking ship. Even Ice Castle employs a low freestyle teen as a group instructor. However, she functions more as a helper and is paid accordingly. Oak Ridge takes the prize for the most ridiculous display of under-qualified professional staff. Some time during my previous tenure at Oak Ridge, a fourteen-year-old girl who was related to the owners or management began teaching groups. She skated like a Freestyle 1 student. She could skate in the way that most children can learn to do a somersault, pound out “chopsticks” on a piano, or write in cursive. Obviously, I was not impressed.
Allow me to clarify. I have no problem with younger skaters helping with learn-to-skate classes as a means of training for coaching careers or to earn free ice time. However, I find it difficult to take a fourteen-year-old teacher seriously in any capacity, no matter how competent a skater s/he may be. And when the kid skates at the lowest possible freestyle level, I find it completely absurd and an insult to the entire profession. Nepotism is one of the strongest forces in universe, and once "in" this kid could not be ousted. Now she is seventeen and stalks through the rink like a demigod.
When I came out on the ice, she was in the midst of teaching a private lesson to an even lower freestyle student, if such a thing is possible. She was not even wearing skates. She stood at the side of the rink, hands on hips, in a pair of metallic flip-flops covered with big plastic gems. Then she stepped into the players’ box and leaned on the boards as though raptly evaluating her student’s program for nationals. Who in the hell does she think she is, Galina Zmievskaya? This kid is riding the nonstop Ego Train to Fantasy Island. How does something like this happen? And somebody is actually paying this little narcissist to teach private lessons. Now that is pathetic. Who teaches a beginning freestyle skater without wearing skates to demonstrate? The real Galina does not need to wear skates to help her champions exude emotion or fine-tune their arm positions. But this wannabe needs to correct her student’s hammer toe jumps.
I actually laughed out loud as I stroked around the rink. This is a funny business, this coaching. I cannot imagine the ego trip a kid gets saying she is a figure skating coach when her peers are flipping burgers and baby sitting, especially a kid who did not grow up with the rigors of serious training and pressures of competition. A very funny business indeed.
***Not the real name of the rink.
Week of June 22, 2008
Confusion at Oak Ridge Arena
I reported to Oak Ridge Arena to teach the second week of classes. The parking lot was suspiciously empty. I was early, planning to skate on the public session before classes. This session had to be dead. Very few people occupied the lobby. The rink space was dark. I introduced myself to the guy at the counter and asked him what was going on. Apparently, group lessons had been held earlier in the day, and there was no public session. No one bothered to tell me. I had wasted a trip to the rink. With the cost of gas, I would have been really furious if the place were far away. I was mad enough as it was.
When I got home, I called Eileen***, the woman who originally contacted me about teaching this set of group classes. I worked with Eileen when I taught at Oak Ridge a few years ago and even took some lessons from her. We have been friendly for a long time. She had been surprised when I did not show up to teach that day and asked another coach if she had seen me. I told Eileen no one had called. She suggested I talk to Alice***, in the main office. Alice was supposedly notifying instructors of schedule changes. Alice informed me that I had only been there the previous week as a sub. They did not need me on a regular basis. This was certainly not what Eileen had said or understood, as she fully expected to see me the second week of the “semester”.
Alice went on with a bunch of awkward crap about how she could not bump another coach to give me a job, including the underage Galina wannabe. She missed my point entirely. I was not asking to displace someone else. Eileen told me the rink had students who needed a teacher. No one was losing a job to accommodate me. Obviously there was a lack of communication between Eileen and the main office. “You’re next on the list when we have an opening,” Alice assured me cheerfully. I don’t know that I want to be on that list at all if it would mean working in a horribly disorganized, confused environment. I had enough of that with Elite. This is actually the second time I was offered classes at Oak Ridge and discovered afterward that I had only served as a substitute. If anyone from Oak Ridge calls again, I will specifically ask if I am subbing, though Eileen would have mistakenly told me “no”. The right hand does not know what the left hand is doing in that place. I told Alice to put my measly paycheck in the mail.
***Names have been changed.
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