How long have you been part of your Skating Club,and when exactly did you join?

[FSWer]

Say, to all our skaters who post here.How long have you been part of your skating club, and why exactly did you join? BTW. can anyone please define what the difference between a Skating Club and a Skating Camp is? Thanks.

[Clarice]

I joined my club over 10 years ago, a year after it was first formed. We joined because my daughter was ready to start testing and competing, and because we wanted to get more involved with people who were as interested in skating as we were. We've had a lot of fun over the years, especially with putting on shows and making friends with other people in the club. My daughter's best friends are other skaters - they go to different schools, but grew up together, training, performing, and competing. They do a lot of things together off-ice, too - parties, shopping trips, etc. I have a lot of good friends in the club, too, although the adults are less likely to get together outside of the rink due to other responsibilities.

So, a skating club can be something fairly permanent in your skating life. It's your home in the skating world, the "team" you represent when you compete. A lot of people belong to the same club for years, and can get to know each other pretty well. A skater doesn't have to join a club if they don't want to; in the US they can be individual members of US Figure Skating. In some places, club members get benefits like being able to skate on members-only ice or getting to perform in club shows, but mostly I thought it was just fun to be part of the group.

A skating camp would be a more temporary thing. Our rink has a summer camp for kids in the Basic Skills program and the lower level club skaters - it's a week long, and is run like any other day camp. The main activity is skating, of course, but they also do crafts, have snack time, etc. Some girls in our club went away to a skating camp this summer - a couple went for a week, and one went for a month. That kind of thing would be similar to other kids going away to a summer music camp or something like that. You get to meet kids from all over who are interested in the same thing as you, so that is the primary activity, but there are usually other social activities planned, too. Sometimes kids go to the same camp every summer for several years, so in that case they might see the same friends every summer, and maybe see them during the year, too, if they go to the same competitions. The kids at a camp wouldn't necessarily all belong to the same club.

[jazzpants]

I've been a proud member of the Skating Club of San Francisco for over 6 years and I've joined b/c of the comaraderie... and of course, the obvious thing about testing and competing. :P

[SynchroSk8r114]

I've been a member of 3 different clubs in my 13 years of skating. My first one I joined in 1996. I joined my second club in 1999 and just joined my current club in April. All were joined so that I can compete and test USFSA, which is why most skaters join clubs to begin with. It's also a little cheaper (some rinks have crossover fees) to belong to a club and test at their test session or ones that welcome your club with no fee.

In case you don't know what a crossover fee is, it's a small fee that you pay to the club that you're testing at in addition to whatever the cost of your figure skating test is. Some clubs have a kind of relationship, you could say, with other local clubs and would eliminate that crossover fee.