What's it really like to be part of a Skating Club?

[FSWer]

Say,I've been wondering what it really is like to be part of a Skating Club? Expecailly one the performs in a show with famous skaters? Also,what do you do when not skating? Things like that.

[jskater49]

What do I do when I'm not skating? Well as Membership chair right now I bug people "Have you turned in your renewal yet?"

Also help with car washes, play music, do registration during competitions, sit on long painful board meetings trying to figure out how much ice to buy and argue about what to pay the skating director...

j

[CanAmSk8ter]

It's not really any different than being part of any other group. Some of your clubmates you'll like more than others; some of them you may not like much at all. Maybe you hang out with them away from the rink, maybe you don't. Skaters aren't different from other teenagers; off the ice my friends and I used to go to the mall, the movies, bowling, the same stuff other kids our age did. My club used to have parties and stuff a couple times a year, and sometimes we'd go and sometimes we wouldn't.

What it's like to skate in a show with famous skaters probably depends on whether they train with you on a regular basis or not. For example, if you skate at a small random club and Kimmie Meissner or someone comes to skate in your club show, chances are the local skaters will get autographs and take pictures with her and stuff like that. But when I was skating at a big training center, I skated in a handful of shows with famous skaters from out of town and my friends and I would never have asked for autographs or anything like that; it would have been totally uncool for a skater except for the little kids. We would stop and say hi and ask skating questions if we had them, but it was understood that asking for pictures and autographs was for fans and little kids, not other serious skaters. Personally, I always felt like I'd rather have ten minutes to talk to Kurt Browning or Scott Hamilton or whoever and try to learn from them than have a picture they wrote their names on, but maybe that's just me.

By the time I moved on to another training center, I was old enough that the elite skaters were essentially my peers- maybe not skating wise, but we were all close in age and sometimes shared ice time; many of them were good friends with my coach (who's not much older than me), and I considered a few of them my friends. That rink didn't have a club the first few years I was there, so we all belonged to different clubs; most of them had moved there to skate and still belonged to their hometown clubs. Some of them didn't represent the U.S. anyway.

Really, belonging to a skating club is no different than being in the drama club or on the volleyball team except that it's a year-round thing for most skaters, and there's a wider variety of ages.