This is what I don’t “get”. How is it that you can’t be bothered to show up for one hour of Church a week, but sports can take over your whole life? It’s as if sports is the
religion, and Christianity is the
hobby instead of the other way around.
Can’t they love it without having to be on a team or having a coach? There is ice on the skating pond all winter long; kids can use it any time they want, for free.
We were evangelical Christian. We did not show up for church one hour a week. No evangelical Christian does that. We were in church or preparing for a church ministry at least 5-6 days/evenings per week.
Usually during those long skating practices, I was working on VBS, children’s choir, children’s church, a Bible study, or some other ministry that I was involved in.
My kids were just as involved. From their childhood, they attended children’s club on Wednesday night, were members of children’s choir, and when they were old enough, were active in the Youth Group. My older daughter was on the leadership team of the youth group, and attended the Youth Council meetings for several years around the country. Both of my daughters sang solos in church, yes, when they were teens. Both of my daughters were in demand as teachers in VBS when they were still teens.
Evangelicals do NOT consider “church” the epitome of worship. Remember, there’s no Mass in evangelical Protestantism, just a worship service. But to an evangelical, all of life is an act of worship. Skating is worship. Watching skating is worship. Driving, sleeping, eating, being human and loving God–all is worship.
One of our beloved evangelical pastors (not one of the pastors at the church that kicked us out), who had been a missionary in Viet Nam for twenty years (got out two weeks before Saigon fell), told us, “YES, you should be at the rink. YOU will be the witness for Christ at that rink!”
I can honestly say, with a clear conscience, that we obeyed our pastor and did our best to be a witness for Christ at the various skating rinks and in the clubs that my daughters were involved with. There are programs established in our city today, GOOD programs for children, that came about because of the work that I did lobbying the Park District and the skating clubs. There are many many skaters who state in the biographies that their best memory of skating is “The Nutcracker” that I produced for seven years in our city. We attracted an audience of over 10,000 people for those productions, and routinely filled two semis full of food for the local food pantry, so I can also say that the work that I did with skating helped to feed many hungry people.
Yes, there are sports that kids can love without coaching or teams. But figure skating is not really one of those sports.
There is skating around and around a pond or rink with your buds, holding hands, doing a few crack the whips, and then heading for the concession stand for hot chocolate afterwards.
That isn’t what the sport of figure skating is. That’s not a sport, that’s a fun thing that you do with friends. It’s like playing chopsticks or Heart and Soul on the piano–fun, but that’s not what I did to learn to play the piano as well as I play it today. As a child and teenager, I routinely spent 2-4 hours a day at the piano to get to the place I am today.
Figure skating is a true sport, with international standards.
You cannot learn how to jump, spin, and use your edges correctly on a frozen pond in a pair of K-Mart skates with no coach. It takes many skaters a year of lessons just to learn to do the axel jump (the only jump in which the skater jumps forward). Double axels and triple axels take even longer.
Figure skating is a sport of edges, and the subtlety and beauty of clean, deep edges cannot be learned without a coach who understands the edges and passes that understanding to his/her students. Most skaters on a frozen pond have no idea what edges are. If you don’t know edges, you don’t know figure skating.
The skills involved with figure skating are difficult and dangerous, and good coaching can help a skater to learn correct techniques that will help them to do the element beautifully and safely.
There are standardized skating tests that all figure skaters work on and take. The goal of most figure skaters is to pass the highest-level tests. A skater can test in the following disciplines:
Moves in the Field (required to pass the Freestyle tests)
Freestyle (what you see on TV)
Pairs
Dance (with a partner)
Solo Dance
School Figures (still offered, but rarely done because they aren’t required)
There are eight levels of testing for each of these disciplines, and for Dance, there are International tests, too.
It takes years and years of work for a skater to pass these tests. Most skaters start working on the tests when they are small children–the first test is the Pre-Preliminary test. Then they spend the rest of their childhood and teenaged years working on the tests. Often a skater will not pass the Moves in the Field and Freestyle tests through the Senior level until they are Seniors in high school–that’s how hard the tests are. Many times, the test has to be repeated over and over again because the skater fails. I know skaters who made five attempts at Senior Moves before passing.
But for every skater, there is pride and joy in passing any of the figure skating tests, especially the Senior tests. You won’t achieve this skating on a pond. .
The sport of synchronized skating is a 50-year old discipline that involves sixteen skaters (at the time my daughters were competing, it was 24 skaters) who have all passed a certain test level (e.g., all skaters on the Junior level synchro teams have to pass their Intermediate Moves test).
Obviously you can’t just head to the local pond and pick up 16-24 skaters and do the elements that a synchro team does. For one thing, the hockey players would throw the team off the pond! For another thing, there has to be a coach to choreograph the maneuvers and correct the skaters and fine-tune the programs.
I encourage everyone, please, to check out this link that is a montage of various synchronized skating teams around the world:
youtube.com/watch?v=ksnNHytIz4s
And here is a link to one of the programs that my daughter was in:
youtube.com/watch?v=0SddbN7knvM
I think you can see from these videos that synchronized skating is not something that you can just love at a frozen pond. It’s addictive, it’s fascinating, it’s a foretaste of heaven.
And finally, in many parts of the country, including ours, there are very few frozen ponds. The city used to freeze over parks and kids and adults would walk down and skate for free. Now they don’t do that anymore–they’re afraid of lawsuits. It’s a different world.
