The Boomerang Effect
September 30, 2008
Boomerang: n. a kind of throwing stick, primarily associated with the Australian Aborigines. When thrown correctly, it travels in a curved path and returns to its point of origin.
I’ve never seen an actual boomerang, or held one in my hands, or tossed one into the air to see if it will return (with my luck, it would probably bonk me in the head.) But I have had several skating students venture out into that big, wide world then boomerang back.
In many cases, it’s because they left the sport with unfinished business, mostly skating tests they now want to check off their lists. Hard as I try to convince kids to finish their skating goals (whatever they may be) before high school graduation, I can’t always adequately impart the urgency I feel on their behalf. Some think, “Oh, I’ll just get that test later, maybe while I’m at college or when I come back for the summer.” And maybe they will…
Of course, what they don’t realize is that, as the months and years pass, there will be all kinds of distractions and a shifting of priorities. (And let’s face it, the body changes in ways we can’t possibly imagine when we’re 18 years old…usually not in ways that are ideal for figure skating.) With panic in my voice, I say things like, “Trust me, it’s not going to get any easier!” And, “Do this now, while you still can!”
Sometimes this message falls on deaf ears and other times skaters do everything they can to get that last test, yet can’t close the deal before leaving for college. I’ve had students in each of these categories, and a handful of them have circled back to finish what they started. When this happens, it’s gratifying, to say the least.
Not only is it generally wonderful to help skaters reach their goals (and especially sweet when delayed), it’s fun to get to know students as they become adults. They are simultaneously the same kids I used to know and also quite different. They’ve gained some perspective while away and independence. Now they’re involved in different pursuits, so their worlds have widened, yet they have become more focused and also more self-motivated.
Granted, this whole boomerang effect in skating is far easier when it comes to Moves in the Field and Dance (what I primarily teach). Coming back to jumps and spins is a whole other story. My sister-in-law, Bobbie Anne Flower, is a rare exception: after quitting skating at age 18, she came back to take her Moves in the Field test at age 29, her Senior Freestyle at age 30 then her Senior Pair test at 31. So this is not impossible, just rare.
Anyway, this summer, I had three students boomerang back. Two returned from college where they skate on successful synchro teams. One took her Silver Samba International Dance and another passed two Gold Dances. A third, Eric Karnani, took a few years off from skating and recently finished high school. He has just moved to Australia (how perfect for this boomerang metaphor) to ice dance with a partner there. This summer, before leaving, he passed his Senior Moves and his Starlight Waltz after only a few short weeks back on the ice.
I decided to ask Eric and a few other “boomerang skaters” what coming back to skating has meant to them and they were kind enough to answer with the following…
Eric: Skating is like an addiction. It is something that you either consciously or unconsciously try to move on from, but somehow get drawn back because you miss it so much. I worked with two amazing coaches before I “quit” skating, and thought that I would never look back. But like all habits, I eventually knew I needed to skate. I knew I needed that feeling of power and passion all combined into one. And so I took that first step back onto the ice to go and pass my Senior Moves, a goal of mine for a very long time. It’s incredible coming back to a sport you used to love and realize you still love it just as much, or even more; you come back with such a different perspective and appreciation for it.
Another skater, Sam Mortimer, e-mailed me a response to this topic hilariously entitled: “Trying to Skate When You are Poor, Lazy and Realize that you can Sleep In.” He first practiced his Dutch Waltz with me wearing a baseball cap and cargo pants at the age of 12 and has now graduated from college. Since high school, he has come back to skating to take three Gold Dances.
He writes: Why is it so hard to skate when you stop skating all the time? I’ll start with my biggest reason, which is when I stopped skating competitively and went to school I realized that there were other things to do. When I was skating all the time I did not think about other things like hanging out late or playing other sports more or even just sleeping in. At New York University, I started doing things that I did not do in high school. Besides, college takes up A LOT more time than high school does, as far as workload. I think part of that comes from going to school in NYC but it also comes from the fact that when anyone goes away to college you all of a sudden feel so much more freedom to do whatever you want to do. So when you have been skating for the past 8 years and then you get the chance to take a break it feels good to just breathe and rest and kind of do nothing and then when the novelty of doing nothing wears off, you do something other than skating.
Second, skating costs LOTS AND LOTS of money and when I am trying to budget myself for food, fun, laundry, transportation etc., all the items that I have to pay for, skating is not factored into my budget. So everyone should be really thankful that their parents paid for them to skate. And I think lastly, I really like skating NOT on a schedule. I treat skating as more of a social event than a rigorous practice. I think that when I want to get back into skating it will be hard but for the time being I like taking it easy. I am sure that a lot of people feel the same way I do: that skating without pressure from parents or coaches makes for a more pleasurable experience. I don’t expect anything out of myself so I can just skate the way I want. I cannot say that I regret how I skated in high school at all and it gave me a really great basis for how I view life in general but I am happy with where I stand with skating now.
Cortney Rosenberg came back to skate with me every summer break from college. She is now a teacher and has her own flock of little prodigies, third graders. She writes:
I don’t remember anything about starting skating. It has just always been there, a part of me. Skating was always a calming influence in my life. No matter what was happening outside of the rink I could always count on my time at the rink and the people that surrounded me there.
Growing up I took for granted how lucky I was to have found something in my life I was so passionate about. Luckily, my parents supported this passion and made sure that I was always enjoying myself. When, in college, I became too hard on myself to enjoy the sport anymore, I decided to take a break from it. I missed it every single day I was away. Life was just not the same. It was only then that I realized I would never be able to take skating out of my life completely. It has become engrained in my spirit. During my summers, I made a conscious choice to spend summers at home so that I could get back to the rink. I would return to my old rinks purely for the love of the sport and the feeling I got stepping on the ice surface. I was always welcomed back. After all, skating was never just a sport but a community. Now that I have a real job, and live a few hours away from the rinks that I grew up training in, it is harder to be able to go skate. I still wake up some mornings wishing I could skip out on work and get on the ice for a couple of hours or that my coaches miraculously lived closer. I beg my friends to join me at public skating sessions just for the burst of cold air and the feeling of gliding that I get from nothing else. Deep down I will always be a skater.
And finally, while I was working on this very CSOM installment, a student named Alyson McGee, who I haven’t seen in years, coincidentally e-mailed me out of the blue. She has just returned from Ethiopia where she was in the Peace Corps. She wrote:
I thought of you today because I just laced up my skates after about two years of not getting on the ice- pretty terrible of me, it was just hard to find the time in college with no skating rink nearby (well actually there were lots of skating rinks near Tufts but they were hockey-ONLY rinks). I recently went to a rink by my parent’s house to see if I still remember how to get around the ice. Thankfully I do and it was really great to get back out there.
I really have missed it a lot since I last competed synchro in 2005. I think it was kind of a shame that I never passed my Senior Moves so I’m thinking about committing to train and finally take that test. Although I am woefully unemployed for now my parents have promised to help me with the costs of skating again (for a limited time only) so that I can accomplish this goal, which I think they have been holding onto for me as well. I definitely have a lot of work to do on my own and I’m expecting that it will take some time to get back to my old self on skates but I’d be interested in having a refresher crash course on Senior Moves and then maybe we can take it from there…
I say to Alyson and to all lapsed skaters who want to test or simply get their “rink legs” back: Of course - boomerang back! Will it be easy? No. Will it be rewarding? Definitely. So call your rink for the schedule and get those blades sharpened. Just remember to take it easy at first. I suggest (from my own experience) that you stretch out your dormant muscles beforehand and also afterwards…
***
Thanks so much to the skaters who contributed to this.
What has been your own experience with skating’s Boomerang Effect? Click on the word “comments” below.
Update: New Moves in the Field
September 23, 2008
My, what a nice loop...and in turquoise skates.
Is it strange that I love the Moves in the Field as much as I do? Okay, don’t answer that.
I know that Moves are basically the piano scales of skating. I know that many skaters and some fellow coaches find these required, fundamental exercises boring beyond words. Yet for some reason, I enjoy teaching them, maybe because I like the challenge of trying to make them fun. I like showing my skaters how the Moves skills relate to other areas of their skating, such as their step sequences and transitions in the Freestyle, Synchro, and Dance programs. And it’s very gratifying to see them climb the Moves testing ladder.
Last year, we started to hear that United States Figure Skating was going to restructure the Moves. I think this news was received by most coaches with a mix of excitement (something new to teach!) and trepidation (uh oh, something new to teach…). I certainly felt both of these things, especially in light of all the new concepts we’ve had to digest due to IJS. Skaters and parents of skaters frantically wondered if they should try to test all the way from Pre-Juvenile level all the way through Senior within the next year in order to avoid the changes.
In fact, the new Moves were proposed at the 2008 Annual Governing Council Meeting last May. However, they did not pass. At the PSA Conference later that month, many coaches got a look at the proposed (yet unapproved) changes during presentations by coaches Damon Allen and Janet Champion, both of Colorado Springs.
Curious about the current status of these changes, I contacted Wayne Hundley, who is the chairperson for the new Moves Task Force. He is a Technical Specialist, a Controller, a National Judge and former competitor located in Riverside, California. The task force includes about 22 people, including USFS Committee chairs, USFS Board Members and PSA Representatives. Hundley was kind enough to update me with a lot of specific information and he encouraged me to pass it along here.
Turns out that since May, they have basically started over from scratch. They are taking into consideration lots of feedback they have received from members-at-large and have been working to address some of the most common concerns.
Among these concerns, is the length of the tests and the amount of ice time clubs need to purchase in order to host these test sessions. In response, Hundley’s committee is now proposing that approximately eight of the current Moves are simply condensed so that they take less time. For example, in the Preliminary Moves, instead of doing two figure eights of Forward and Backward Crossovers around the hockey circles, the skaters would do only one figure eight forward, then flow directly into a backwards figure eight without stopping. Another example of this is on the Juvenile Eight Step Mohawk Sequence: instead of stopping between directions, they are proposing that this is set up as a figure eight and one circle simply flows into the next, similar to how the Juvenile Backward Power Three Turns currently work.
In this new plan, some moves have been taken away all together, such as the Intermediate Back Perimeter Power Crossovers with Backward Power Three Turns, the Novice Bracket-Three-Brackets and the Junior Forward and Backward Power Circles. This is meant to make time for the addition of some entirely new moves, which feature Loops, Twizzles, and some Circle Eights reminiscent of School Figures. They believe that these will be helpful to competitive skaters using IJS for Freeskating, Pair, Dance and Synchro and that they will also impart important skills for skaters on the test track.
Along these same lines, there are also some revisions to the Novice and Senior Spiral Sequences to incorporate more kinds of spirals. Specifically, the Novice test would include all eight spirals (i.e. now there would be Forward Outside Spirals and Back Inside Spirals on both feet in that sequence). And the Senior test would change slightly at the end of the pattern to include a Forward Outside Spiral. At both of these levels, the skater would be required to hold each Spiral for a designated number of seconds, in some cases three seconds and in some cases six.
In all, there are approximately 16 changes, and this number includes those eight Moves that aren’t really changed, just condensed. From what I can tell thus far from Hundley’s extremely clear and organized proposal, the changes are not very drastic. And they make sense. I like the idea of incorporating twizzles, loops, and some old-school figure eights into the Moves and getting rid of a lot of the restarts.
I think what would take the most effort to learn would probably be the proposed Junior Straight Line Step and the new Senior Circular Step Sequence. This latter pattern does use some of the current version, but with the addition of a few new turns, like Twizzles and Counters. Hundley underscored the fact that the Senior test is the culmination of the whole process, so it’s important that this test incorporates as many of the Moves skills as possible. Truthfully, it doesn’t even seem like these two Moves are very complicated, nothing to get anxious about.
Hundley said, “Skating is constantly evolving and we want the Moves to reflect that progress.” He emphasized that the Moves are meant to improve basic skating skills, such as better turn quality et cetera, for all skaters, not just competitors.
Hundley assured me that none of this is a secret. They already have the diagrams finished and coach Gerry Lane is helping to get the video clips ready. They hope to have lots of the information for these newest proposals posted on the USFS website as early as mid-November. They will be presenting these New Moves yet again at the 2009 Governing Council Meeting next May, so they are hoping to have lots of input on the proposal before then. The Professional Skaters Association would, as always, put together the manual, which outlines the focus of each Move and the common errors.
If this newest version passes in May, these Moves will go into effect September 2009.
Thanks so much to Wayne Hundley for so generously sharing all of this info and providing lots of much-needed clarity. It will be interesting to see if this all goes through and fun to play with some new (and slightly tweaked) tricks.
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So what do you think of all this? Please leave a comment below.
If you subscribe to Professional Skater Magazine, check out page 8 for a humorous essay I wrote about the PSA Ratings process…
And, this weekend I went to Oktoberfest in Central Park. To read The Informer report, click here.
What I Did this Summer
September 16, 2008
I’m back. I hope your summer was excellent and that your fall is coming together nicely.
Geeky as it may be, I used to love going back to school in September, mostly because that meant obtaining a new pencil case and also partly because of those What I Did This Summer reports we got to write. Of course, I also adored Show and Tell day, so imagine me reading this report in front of a classroom with the blackboard behind me…
Let me clear my throat and shift around up here somewhat nervously as I look out at the rest of you folded into your little desks…okay. So this summer, in addition to coaching, I did lots of writing, which involved obscene amounts of java, bleary eyes, and tense typing shoulders (otherwise known as “boulder shoulder” in certain circles.) For better or worse, my skin tone remained utterly unchanged. Rink tan + coffee shop tan = frightening white.
I did stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge once, meander through Central Park once, did enjoy the splendid view from a friend’s rooftop deck (24 floors above the city), watched the sun set once from a NYC bistro on the Hudson River, dined amid two flourishing gardens outside the city, and generally took advantage of as many sidewalk cafes as humanly possible. Mainly though, I tap danced my fingertips across my keyboard.
Recently, instead of telling my friends that I’m writing when they call, I say that I’m at the “office.” Of course, my office is nomadic; it includes a circuit of coffee shops (both in my neighborhood and beyond) and sometimes the desk in my apartment. I like how saying “office” sounds slightly official. I also like how it’s a bit unspecific. What I mean is that if I were to claim that I was writing, that might not literally be the case. I might in fact just be staring at the wall gearing up to write. Or I may be looking at my laptop screen, thinking. Or I may be fidgeting with my fingernails, thinking about gearing up to stare at my screen so I can think about writing. If I say I’m “at the office” this means I’m in the writing space, in the most general sense.
For example, I might answer my phone kind of softly so as to not annoy the fellow coffeeshoppers around me, “Hello?”
“You’re in ‘the office’ aren’t you?” my friend might say.
“Affirmative,” I might say back, cupping my hand over the phone and looking at the person at the table next to me with an apologetic this-won’t-be-long expression on my face.
“Okay,” my friend responds respectfully, but also probably smirking. “I’ll let you get back to work. I don’t want your boss to get mad.”
“Yeah, she’s been a real jerk so far today,” I say, furtively. “Call you later.”
Pretending I have an office and all-powerful writing boss helps me to best utilize the limited hours I’m away from the rink. But here’s the most beautiful thing…and can I get a drumroll for this please?… Here goes: if you put a space between the two syllables of the word office…you get ‘off ice’ and you don’t have to know me well to realize that I find this clever little word play downright delightful.
So the main thing I worked on when I was off ice this summer was my book, called “Skate at Your own Risk.” Many have kindly requested to see this manuscript and have been denied that pleasure. For that, I apologize, but I believe that “all good things come to those who wait” and “patience is a virtue.” Trust me, the book doesn’t rely on clichés nearly as much as that last sentence might imply. I just want the thing to be fully cooked before I serve it up. Some of you have seen some snippets and others, if you’ve been reading this blog, have gotten a taste without even realizing it.
To “show” the other things I worked on this summer, I present the following three links:
The first is an article about Tommy Litz for icenetwork describing his exciting foray into “phototivity.” I love to see how this sport can inform other areas of our lives and Tommy is making very cool connections between figure skating and art. To read, click here.
The second is another article for icenetwork about the venerable Wayne Seybold – he is now the mayor of Marion, Indiana. My brother and I trained alongside him and his sister, Natalie, when we first arrived in Delaware as teenagers. The Seybolds were a huge inspiration to us back then so I was thrilled to interview him about all he’s gone on to accomplish since competing in the Olympics. To read, click here.
Finally, I am excited to announce that I have become a staff blogger for a website called Uppereast.com (because there just wasn’t enough blogging in my life already.) It’s called the Upper East Side Informer. This means I go around and review different businesses and events in this quadrant of New York City. Basically, it’s a matter of enlisting my friends to join me in eating, drinking, and gallivanting through the neighborhood, while I take notes along the way. By the way, from here on, if you’d like to refer to me as the The Informer (as a few people in my life have sarcastically begun to do), you are welcome to do so. To read, click here.
Enjoy, and check back next Tuesday. For the months ahead, I’ve got lots of funny lined up, reviews of skating products and books, interviews, and even some “hard-hitting” journalism (note quotation marks).
If you send this link on to others who might appreciate it, I’ll be forever grateful. And I can aim that gratitude more specifically in your direction if you leave a comment telling me you did so…okay, or just telling me anything at all.
Thanks to everyone who weighed in a few months ago on their favorite installments and who made suggestions for future ones. It’s good to be back!
