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View Full Version : What's the status of Figures in today's skating world?


drskater
07-20-2010, 02:25 PM
I’ve noticed quite a few threads that refer to Figures these days. I understand that some of the new MITF tests require a Figure component and perhaps this fact accounts for a growing interest. However, I’m curious: are Figures making a serious comeback across the nation? Is there genuine momentum to revive them?

I’m lucky because my coach has her Eighth Figure and lots of experience teaching them. But what about the younger coaches? Are rinks or clubs booking patch ice and is there enough interest to make such sessions viable? Does there remain a substantial pool of the proper judges to adjudicate figure tests (i.e still alive and kicking?).

I’m thrilled with the idea of Portland’s All Figure Competition and hope to compete there sometime. Yet I’m a total beginner, like most people these days. My own club is hosting a free School Figures Workshop this September to try to educate the young skaters in the basics (we’re fortunate that our old rink ‘s floor is not white, so when the ice goes in the surface is dark enough to really see tracings).

Anyway, I’m intrigued and would love to hear what’s going on in your part of the world. Thanks!

Isk8NYC
07-20-2010, 02:38 PM
Our skating camps (adult and children) included a Figures session this year, but it was primarily for the low-level skaters, to build edging and figure eights. The rink is also running a midday Figures and Edges group class one or two days a week. I have noticed other rinks in NC mentioning figures on their lists of on-ice classes, but I don't know how often those classes actually run. They may have been listed on the website/brochure to gauge interest.

The new USFSA Preliminary Moves test includes inside/outside eights, but they're a modified version.

Many coaches who did figures have included basic eights as training drills for years, but there are very few clean-ice opportunities to go beyond that level. That's why the Sk8Mate (marker adapter for a scribe) had a resurgence in popularity - you can use it to map out a circle even on poor ice. It doesn't make you skate any better, but it gives a guideline for size and shape for a beginner. I have not seen anyone willingly practicing figures below the age of 30, although I have one young skater who is intrigued about them and has been practicing basic figure eights.

The Loop figure has grown in popularity during footwork sequences thanks to IJS judging that recognizes and rewards innovations. (Everything old is new again, huh?) Occasionally, a skater and coach will work on that figure, but it's more an end to the means than laying out a perfect loop figure. It's used as an informal drill for learning loops to include in footwork.

I think there's a growing interest in figures among adults, since Figures is a great discipline for developing/improving skills. More importantly, Figures can be done pretty much throughout your life, even after aging issues limit freestyle skating.
Skating can be a lifelong sport, and Figures is a way to challenge and better yourself, regardless of age.

However, I haven't seen any Figures tests being judged at test sessions in this area. We can select the discipline when registering for our Club's test sessions, so it might happen at some point.

techskater
07-20-2010, 08:20 PM
I am lucky in that both of my coaches passed their 8th at different times (one in the 60s, one right before they were eliminated in 1991-2 ish). Both incorporate figures/how to do figures in lessons as pieces of footwork
/lessons and how to's.

In our area, there are some judges that can judge figures and are happy to do so if requested through the test chair of any of the clubs in our area if you want to test. In fact, Manleywoman is the last person I am aware of in our area to take (and pass) a figure test.

Lake Placid offers figure tests on their test forms still.

Skittl1321
07-20-2010, 09:27 PM
I'm doing my first figure lesson on Saturday. It's at a rink 60 miles from me, as no one at my rink can teaches them (we have a few coaches who maybe could, but I don't really work with them, and a few who did a test or two but don't teach them. Mostly our coaches are too young and never did them at all)

There is no patch ice. I've been told we'll take a corner of the freestyle session, getting there as early as possible and dealing with people who skate through. It would be a tough set up for a high figure, but for preliminary most of those are on the MITF, so the scribe should be the only thing that says I'm working on anything different.

No clubs offer figures tests on their forms, but from what I've heard you can request it. An adult in this area passed preliminary figure in the recent past.

blue111moon
07-21-2010, 06:56 AM
Speaking from experience, if you're on a MITF session, the ends aren't a good place to do figures. I found that one of the blue lines worked the best for keeping me out of the traffic patterns. Depending upon the levels of the Moves skaters, only a few would be coming through the middle of the rink, but just about all the patterns use the ends. Plus having the line makes finding centers and lining up the circles easier, especially for a beginner.

RachelSk8er
07-21-2010, 07:37 AM
Part of what will prevent figures from ever coming back in full force the way we knew them all boils down to MONEY (no surprise). To have an effective patch/figures session, you need to limit the number of skaters allowed to less than clubs can pack on a regular freestyle/moves session. (I can't remember how many skaters were allowed on our patch sessions but it was not a lot compared to freestyle sessions.) Obviously during that session, figures are the only thing you were allowed to work on. It just was not cost-effective for rinks and clubs to offer all of this ice for figures and they wound up losing money--and ice back then was much cheaper, so clubs would be losing even more today if they had to just offer figures ice. Instead, with moves, you can offer a whole ton of general sessions and it doesn't matter whether skaters are doing moves or freestyle.

I do think that having figures back when my age group (or anyone older) were kids is perhaps part of what accounts for the HUGE difference I see in discipline on the ice. (Not work ethic, but discipline--watching out for other skaters, not hanging out in the center of the ice or in the corners, not screaming "MOVE" very rudely at other skaters who actually have the right-of-way and all the other stuff I see going on now.) Figures sessions were very, very strict. You skate to your area, and get to work. You kept your mouth shut and there was no goofing off or screwing around. The ice monitors and coaches didn't put up with anyone's crap and if you didn't follow the rules, you were sent off the ice. That translated to everyone following the rules at freestyle and dance sessions, too.

Figures is on my to-do list when we finish my moves. I'd like to see if we can get a figures class going at my rink, especially since we have plenty of empty morning ice (2 surfaces and only 1 is usually in use before 8am) and we also have a small studio rink that is not used most of the time. I think it would be great for the adults especially, and most of us (regardless of current skating level) would be starting in the same place. Some of us have a little experience but we'd all need to go back to the beginning.

blue111moon
07-22-2010, 07:41 AM
Maximum number of skaters on a traditional patch (figures) session in the old days was 22. The ice was divided into 12 strips, with one person on each of the ends (because the rounded corners make the strip smaller) and two on each of the middle strips. In a pinch, you could squeeze two skaters on each end but that was usually done only if the two skaters had small circles so they didn't overlap much. My circles are actually too large for the end patches. Plus the ice there was usually bumpy and sloped so getting stuck on the end was never a good thing. :)

Ellyn
07-22-2010, 10:40 AM
Oh, I usually had the end patches when I was working on preliminary figures and still sometimes for the first test figures. I wasn't small at the time, but the better patches went to the more advanced skaters.

Isk8NYC
07-22-2010, 10:52 AM
We used to have the option of buying more than one patch, so some skaters would control the entire width or two adjoining patches. Full members who purchased the ice at the beginning of the season had first pick of the patches, full members, associate members (whose home club was elsewhere), then guests. I don't remember the patch choice being done by level, I think it might have been seniority with the Club. Long-term members ranked over newbies and got to pick first.

Guests were limited to three freestyles, but could come to any patch sessions they wanted, which I thought was a double standard. Looking back, I realize our ice wasn't that great for patch, so they had to sell it somehow.

My Club rarely sold those end patches, but coaches with young beginners liked that spot because they were less-distracting for everyone.

It was a small club and there were usually open patches available for walk-on. It was an open-air (but roofed) rink, so it was cold doing the slow-moving figures for 30 minutes to an hour.

fsk8r
07-22-2010, 10:54 AM
How big were the patches?
Or rather, roughly how big a diameter were the circles of the 8?

Isk8NYC
07-22-2010, 11:36 AM
For some reason, 20' is the patch width measurement that I remember. I know that the rink I skated at was rebuilt to be a standard size and skating club volunteers came in to measure and put up the patch number markers and stickers. It was just a small (8"?) vertical stripe of tape or paint at the top of the boards on each side with the patch number next to it, like this:

|
13

There would be a corresponding mark and number on the other side of the rink, width-wise. At the start of the session, coaches/skaters would scratch a straight line across the ice from marker to marker to denote the lane. You never skated across the patch - always along the wall or or the lane line.

Advanced skaters knew where they wanted to start. Lower-level skaters (like me!) paced out the starting point along the lines from the wall by side-stepping. Each side-step was around 2'. I remember measuring out (by side-stepping) 7-8 side steps (around 15') so that my circle diameter was 3x my height. My circles didn't touch the edges of the lane.

RachelSk8er
07-22-2010, 11:49 AM
The two rinks I mostly skated at as a kid when figures were still around couldn't sell as many patches. The ends at one were too sloped/bumpy/puddled/crappy to sell, and the other rink was 15' shorter than NHL size. We didn't have any senority for who got what, but if your mom was on the club board, that pretty much meant you got whatever patch your little heart desired. :roll: Plus the only time they really offered figures ice was 5-7 AM, so you pretty much HAD to skate both before and after school, because all the freestyle ice was in the afternoon. From that perspective, luckily I didn't have to do figures very long, moves came about when I was 11 within a year of me starting private lessons. Although I had major ADD as a kid and was bored in school, so skating in the morning usually calmed me down.

The club I eventually switched to had the ice light blue so that tracings could be seen more easily, and they kept it that way for a long time after figures were done away with (at least until 2003). I can't skate there any more because it makes me sick (it's really run down now, strong zamboni fumes and CO) but I stopped by last year and was sad to see it was finally white.

Guests were limited to three freestyles, but could come to any patch sessions they wanted, which I thought was a double standard. Looking back, I realize our ice wasn't that great for patch, so they had to sell it somehow.

Our clubs all had that rule too, you couldn't walk on a freestyle session more than 3x without becoming an associate member. I'm pretty sure all of them have since done away with this, because it's stupid--it only kept walk-ons away and clubs lost extra $$ they could have made. Most of the ice at some of the rinks here isn't even handled through the clubs any more, the rink offers it and club membership doesn't even matter. Or the clubs that do have their own ice are so desparate for skaters that they don't care. When the cost of an hour of ice has almost doubled in the last 15 years, you can't be too picky. (Or the city rinks where ice used to be cheap and the snotty moms who ran the clubs used to keep the sessions as selective as possible have been sold/leased to management companies and the ice time is no longer subsidized by the city.)

Skittl1321
07-22-2010, 01:14 PM
I'm pretty sure all of them have since done away with this, because it's stupid--

Some of the clubs in this area still have that rule- it's a way to gain $ from associate members. The board tends to vote to waive the rule if they know another club lost their ice and ALL the skaters will be visiting for like a month. But it's easy enough not to skate on club ice- just use rink freestyle instead.

Isk8NYC
07-22-2010, 01:19 PM
As I said, our Patch sessions weren't well attended because of the ice quality, so any guests were welcome to help pay the bills. It was an odd time, so the ice rental was less expensive, whereas the free/dance sessions were during "prime time" slots that the hockey leagues would have snapped up in a heartbeat.

Once I was on the Club board, I developed a better perspective of that policy. Limiting guests was just a different tactic, one that was in vogue at many of the clubs in the area. It served two purposes: it kept the Club in good standing and provided much-needed cash flow up front.

Allowing unlimited guesting meant that no one had to be a member of the Club. The Club ran the risk of losing their USFSA membership due to too-few members. Plus, members got a little ticked off when guests monopolized the ice and cassette player on freestyle sessions. Three visits were enough to decide if you liked the club and session enough to become a member and stay on the session. There were no rink-run freestyles at the time, plus the Club offered organized ice dance sessions as well.

Having more members also meant that cash flow was better: less scraping to meet the ice rental fees each month. Because the rink was open-air, guest attendance would plummet during bad weather and also during competition weekends. A club couldn't rely on guests to pay the ice bills. They needed members to commit to help pay the bills. Later on, they became savvy and didn't contract for the ice during Mid-Atlantics, or Christmas week, which helped balance the books.

Today, many clubs (but not all) have given up renting the ice for freestyle and dance sessions because of rental costs and financial situations. Rinks have found that it's a profitable session for the facility to run, if attendance is high enough. Plus, the rink gets the cash float from selling punch cards that take weeks to use up, or even better, are lost and never redeemed in full. A for-profit rink is in a better situation to make interest on the monies than a not-for-profit skating club run by volunteers.

The business model has changed over the years, perhaps for the better.

icedancer2
07-22-2010, 02:40 PM
The two rinks I mostly skated at as a kid when figures were still around couldn't sell as many patches. The ends at one were too sloped/bumpy/puddled/crappy to sell, and the other rink was 15' shorter than NHL size. We didn't have any senority for who got what, but if your mom was on the club board, that pretty much meant you got whatever patch your little heart desired. :roll: Plus the only time they really offered figures ice was 5-7 AM, so you pretty much HAD to skate both before and after school, because all the freestyle ice was in the afternoon. From that perspective, luckily I didn't have to do figures very long, moves came about when I was 11 within a year of me starting private lessons. Although I had major ADD as a kid and was bored in school, so skating in the morning usually calmed me down.



This is so interesting to me because when I was a kid in the '60s there were not enough patches in a session to accommodate all who wanted them. If you came in on a Saturday there would be three patch sessions, interspersed with freestyle and dance sessions - you were very lucky to be able to skate on two of those sessions. If a person left their patch for more than 5 minutes you could claim their patch as your own... how times changed as figures were done away with. Back then there were no freestyle tests until you were Novice (6th figure) and then you had to pass the figure test first and then in the same test session you could do your freestyle test. If you failed the freestyle you had to re-skate your figures the next time you took the test, even if you had passed that portion the first time.

So getting lots of figures practice time was more important than how the ice was (we had a system wherein everyone had a chance to get the "good" patches - being that it was a club owned rink, at that time you just paid your club membership dues and all of your sessions were included. Those were the days...

Fast forward 2010 and I am still skating patch. We have a dedicated patch session once a week in the evening for the three months leading up to our Figures competition in August. There are only about 10 skaters and so everyone gets their own strip (generally, although last week I shared) - the rink is in a mall so there is noise. We openly talk and generally people are a lot less severe about what is done on a patch. When I get bored with the figures I am working on I might practice turns or dance steps or MITF - there is one skater who uses her patch every week to re-learn how to skate after bilateral hip surgery - she might do a few figures and then just work on turns, etc. this is very different than what was allowed in the past, as others have noted.

Some people wear iPods and listen to music (I think I would have liked patch a lot better in the old days if that had been allowed) - I have seen dance teams work on turns together in killian or waltz position using the circle as the basis of their work (in other words, they do their moves together in dance position on a circle 8).

In terms of the New MITF a lot of people are a ltitle worried that the coaches who never did figures will not be able to do/teach loops, for instance. I am hoping that with maybe a new renewed interest in figures that US Figure Skating will find a new way to do "patch" -

Thank for bringing upn this topic. It is especially interesting in light of our "2nd Annual All-Figures Open Competition" coming up August 7-8, Portland, OR

www.oregonskating.org

blue111moon
07-23-2010, 07:12 AM
Back in the '80s when I was doing figures seriously (not well, but seriously), the only way anyone could do figures was to join the skating club. Patch ice alternated with freestyle ice. You had to sign up for patch ice ahead of time (I paid for the entire season at once) and patches were assigned in a rotating order. The patches were numbered as Isk8NYC said (although I'm remembering 16' as the width - it must be adjusted by the size of the rink?) and every session would have a list of the skaters names next to the patch number each was assigned to for that session. If you started with Patch 1 (the Dreaded End) then you knew that next time you'd be on 2, then 3 and it would be 19 weeks before you ended up on the Other Dreaded End again. And if you did get an end patch, if you were lucky someone else wouldn't show up and the ice monitor would let you move to the empty one. If you showed up more than 10 minutes late for the session, you could find that your patch had been given to one of the end patch people and that you'd be stuck with the end, or worse, that your place had been sold to a walk-on skater and you had no ice at all.

There were tons of rules associated with patch sessions. Besides the "Never skate through someone else's patch" and "no talking unless it's to your coach" there were ones for proper dress (skirts and sweaters for women, slim trousers and jackets for men - I know a coach who refused to teach a student who showed up in sweatpants) and about always asking permission fromthe other skater on your strip before you attempted to do serpentines because the third lobe would cross into "their" paitch.

At the time I considered figures to be almost a form of meditation - the quiet, the concentration, the hypnotic repetition of movements. I liked it and doing figures now amid flying bodies on a freestyle or Moves session just isn't as calming as it had been.

Oh, and then there was the ritual of The Changing of the Skates. It required careful scheduling of lessons and time management skill because if you had first frestyle lesson, you had to keep an eye on the clock and make sure you got off early enough to change from the patch skates with the king-pick-less blades to the freestyle ones but not so early that your mom or your coach complained that you weren't using all the patch ice time they'd paid for. :)

I do wonder what's going to happen to the younger coaches who never learned figures with the new MITF elements. At my rink now, only three of the coaches tested high enough to have done all the loops and some of the youngest coaches (the ones under 30) have never done any figures at all. A couple of the more forward-thinking young-'uns have approached the older ones about learning figures in order to be able to teach them but the rest have just shrugged it off and said that they'll just go teach ISI instead.

Isk8NYC
07-23-2010, 07:23 AM
This brings back such memories, thanks for sharing them. I remember the rules about patches being sold/given away if you were late or left the ice early.

I had patch skates, which were an old pair of freestyle skates with the bottom toepick ground off by the sharpener.

I remember changing skates, which really was a necessity when you skated outdoors. It let you get some circulation back into your feet, but brrrr - the freestyle boots were cold if you didn't leave them in the warming room while you skated figures.

I also think that Figures would be much more enjoyable today since we have MP3 players and iPods. The meditation thing only lasted half the session with me before I became antsy.

I also remember doing the outside eight, then side-stepping two paces to do the inside eight so the tracings were separated.

I never had a scribe back then, but I bought one via eBay a few years ago just because I wanted to have it. I've used it a few times, but not regularly.

Timely topic to discuss since I'm teaching figures at summer camp today. Back outside and waltz eights -- oooOOO0000oooo...

Purple Sparkly
07-23-2010, 09:09 AM
I started skating after figures had been replaced, so I never had the opportunity of learning them when I was younger. Now I am starting to teach and I will have to be able to teach figures. In the past few years, I have worked on figures some. I was going to test my Preliminary figure test two years ago, but they cancelled the test session and I just haven't had the time to practice them since then. I already told my coach that I want to have lessons on figures and I want her to teach me like I was the appropriate level skater so I would be able to explain it properly to my students. When I am done with moves, I may also consider testing at least the first few levels of figures.

icedancer2
07-23-2010, 11:13 AM
I started skating after figures had been replaced, so I never had the opportunity of learning them when I was younger. Now I am starting to teach and I will have to be able to teach figures. In the past few years, I have worked on figures some. I was going to test my Preliminary figure test two years ago, but they cancelled the test session and I just haven't had the time to practice them since then. I already told my coach that I want to have lessons on figures and I want her to teach me like I was the appropriate level skater so I would be able to explain it properly to my students. When I am done with moves, I may also consider testing at least the first few levels of figures.

I think this is great that you want to learn more about figures so you can teach properly! There are so many details associated with figures (like the use of the free-foot, free leg and free-toes!) that never really get taught somehow with the Moves (or the student can't see the purpose of such things) - I see this on Moves tests all the time especially at the lower levels and especially with students from coaches who never studied figures... although some of the skaters who are students of former "figures" coaches seem to do okay with this.

It's great to reminisce about skating patch, from whatever era, but I also find space to practice figures on all sorts of sessions - on somewhat empty public session in my area you will find a group of 3-4 skaters lined up down the middle setting up their figures. I've learned not to get mad if a skater skates through my figure - how on earth do they know what I am doing? If it is a crowded session I don't care so much about tracings, centers and such and just concentrate on the edge or the turn or where my back is in relation to the circle... I appreciate it if a skater who has never seen figures asks me what I am doing and I see some of our younger skaters who have started to do figures showing other skaters how to do it. The interest is building slowly. I doubt that figures will ever make a "comeback" but in some form at least...

Interesting that one of the commentators at Olympics and Worlds mentioned that the Japanese skaters were starting to do figures again (in talking about Takahashi and Oda) - I'm wondering now what form that takes - do they have patch sessions? Tests? Or their own version of MITF? It would be interesting to find out!!

RachelSk8er
07-23-2010, 11:50 AM
Allowing unlimited guesting meant that no one had to be a member of the Club. The Club ran the risk of losing their USFSA membership due to too-few members. Plus, members got a little ticked off when guests monopolized the ice and cassette player on freestyle sessions. Three visits were enough to decide if you liked the club and session enough to become a member and stay on the session. There were no rink-run freestyles at the time, plus the Club offered organized ice dance sessions as well.

Having more members also meant that cash flow was better: less scraping to meet the ice rental fees each month. Because the rink was open-air, guest attendance would plummet during bad weather and also during competition weekends. A club couldn't rely on guests to pay the ice bills. They needed members to commit to help pay the bills. Later on, they became savvy and didn't contract for the ice during Mid-Atlantics, or Christmas week, which helped balance the books.

I don't think the rule helped cash flow here whatsoever because we have so many rinks in a fairly small geographic area. To walk on anywhere, you HAD to be a member of one home club. To walk on at a different home club, you had to become an associate after 3 walk-ons. (There was a form you had to fill out with your name, contact info, and home club when you walked on and the club kept it on file to track how many times you walked on). So that just meant that if you had to walk on, you scattered your walk-ons through various clubs, and instead of club A getting my money when I walked on because I'd already been there 3 times (and didn't want to pay the $$ to join), club B got it instead.

I honestly don't think I walked on at other rinks enough to really ever have to worry about this since I was a home club member at one rink (where I tested and took privates), and had to be an associate at the rink where my synchro team was out of so I could pick up as many sessions as I wanted there.

This was also back in the 90s when club membership around here was something like $40 for home club and $30 for associate, now depending on the club it's $80-120 for home club and $45-80 for associate.

There were tons of rules associated with patch sessions. Besides the "Never skate through someone else's patch" and "no talking unless it's to your coach" there were ones for proper dress (skirts and sweaters for women, slim trousers and jackets for men - I know a coach who refused to teach a student who showed up in sweatpants) and about always asking permission fromthe other skater on your strip before you attempted to do serpentines because the third lobe would cross into "their" paitch.

We were NEVER allowed to skate in pants even after they got rid of figures, our club required dresses and zip-up sweaters on all sessions. A lot of coaches even had their own rules on top of that because this was the 90s and the era of hideous neon spandex and the dresses with matching leggings. My coach didn't care much, but there were others who didn't allow the leggings or loud colors and hideous patterns during lessons.

I do wonder what's going to happen to the younger coaches who never learned figures with the new MITF elements. At my rink now, only three of the coaches tested high enough to have done all the loops and some of the youngest coaches (the ones under 30) have never done any figures at all. A couple of the more forward-thinking young-'uns have approached the older ones about learning figures in order to be able to teach them but the rest have just shrugged it off and said that they'll just go teach ISI instead.

To give you an idea, I'm 29 and they got rid of figures when I was 11. So basically any skater younger than me would probably not have done any figures, unless they started private lessons very young. And I don't know if it's just a trend I've noticed around here, but I don't recall skaters going from group to privates as young as they do now. When I was a kid, you went to privates usually between ages 8-11 after you fully completed learn to skate and usually junior club and were ready for pre-preliminary. Obviously there were some kids who went to privates sooner, but not very many. You actually had to be ready for pre-pre to be allowed on most club sessions. Now I see tons of basic skills kids who are 4 or 5 and can barely do crossovers taking privates (well, that and 8 yr olds landing doubles...so I guess it just goes with changes in the sport), and the basic skills level you have to have passed to be allowed on club sessions is pretty low. Makes it a lot more dangerous. I'm sure some of that is also in response to lower numbers of skaters contracting ice and needing to fill sessions to break even.

daisies
07-25-2010, 10:05 PM
I do think that having figures back when my age group (or anyone older) were kids is perhaps part of what accounts for the HUGE difference I see in discipline on the ice. (Not work ethic, but discipline--watching out for other skaters, not hanging out in the center of the ice or in the corners, not screaming "MOVE" very rudely at other skaters who actually have the right-of-way and all the other stuff I see going on now.) Figures sessions were very, very strict. You skate to your area, and get to work. You kept your mouth shut and there was no goofing off or screwing around. The ice monitors and coaches didn't put up with anyone's crap and if you didn't follow the rules, you were sent off the ice. That translated to everyone following the rules at freestyle and dance sessions, too.

THIS!!!

When I was a kid, we had a lot of elite skaters at my rink because Mr. Nicks taught there, so God help you if you weren't disciplined and didn't follow the rules. You'd be out of there in a second. These days, I am astounded by the lack of discipline and just basic common sense by skaters. But I guess they can't learn it if their coaches don't know how to teach it to them.

Back on topic ... at that rink, we had a max of 22 patches (11 on each side), but they also offered loop patches where there'd be three skaters across instead of just two. So the max on those was 33. And they were always full!

I miss figures in the sense that I think everyone should be doing them because the skating we'd see would be so much better, but personally I don't miss them because I am "figured out." When I took the second half of my 8th in 2004, I skated the last figure and said to my coach, "I hope I don't have to reskate anything because I don't have one figure left in me." I was totally spent. (The happy ending: I passed without a reskate. Yay!)

JulieN
07-27-2010, 04:26 PM
US Figure Skating just published the 2011 Rulebook online and I was surprised to see that they included a link to the Compulsory Figures Rules. I don't recall seeing the Figures link when they had the 2010 Rulebook online.

http://usfsa.org/New_Judging.asp?id=361

icedancer2
07-27-2010, 07:32 PM
US Figure Skating just published the 2011 Rulebook online and I was surprised to see that they included a link to the Compulsory Figures Rules. I don't recall seeing the Figures link when they had the 2010 Rulebook online.

http://usfsa.org/New_Judging.asp?id=361

That is awesome and good to know. I will definitely be bookmarking that site (if possible) -
About 5 years ago I received with my rulebook a CD that had the whole rulebook and the Rules for Figures on it (I'm a judge so you get a free rulebook) - I don't know that anyone else got that but maybe because I had taken a figures test the year before? Anyway if people are asking about it then the US Figure Skating will respond.

I am just finishing getting in all the registrations for the figures competition we are hosting in a few weeks. As a stand-alone competition it is hard to get large numbers of competitors although we will have more skaters this year than the first year. I'm wondering if we will see figures offered as parts of other competitions or in some other venue. I keep thinking that there has got to be something else we can do in figure skating rather than always either testing or competing. But figures are even less interesting than compulsory dance for use at exhibitions... anyway, I will be sure to write a report after the figures competition which takes place August 7th and 8th!!

Ellyn
07-27-2010, 07:42 PM
US Figure Skating just published the 2011 Rulebook online and I was surprised to see that they included a link to the Compulsory Figures Rules. I don't recall seeing the Figures link when they had the 2010 Rulebook online.

http://usfsa.org/New_Judging.asp?id=361

Thanks for the link.

I'm pretty sure I saw a link to the figures rules online there a week or two ago, before they changed 2010 to 2011. It might have been a subsection of the Tests book. Or a separate link of its own. The Rulebook part also had separate links for the governance part and the Rules of Sport part on the page I'm remembering.

Isk8NYC
07-28-2010, 12:40 AM
The Compulsory Figures pdf (http://www.usfigureskating.org/Content/Compulsory%20Figures%20Rules.pdf) is on the Rulebook page (http://www.usfigureskating.org/New_Judging.asp?id=361) and has been for some time, with its own link.

It's the same one from the 2010 rulebook page since it's frozen in time. The USFSA doesn't include it in the printed rulebook, however. A few years ago, we had a number of members ask the USFSA for copies of the pdf via email. I guess putting it online saved them a few inquiries.

singerskates
07-28-2010, 03:55 AM
Today figures are used to add up elements in the technical side of ISU COP, USA's IJS and Canada's CPC marking system. There are many digits to add up in the Program component score as well.

I've only seen figures (school patterns) used in group lessons while teaching edges and/or stroking during spring and summer skating schools in my area. Most off the time, we don't have the time or space on the ice for it. I still think it should be taught for the first few levels of skating as enrichment but never tested and definately never competed again.