Guildford Spectrum Reorganises To Provide Fully For Its Young Champions Of The Future
Guildford Spectrum, one of the busiest and most successful leisure facilities in the UK, is always looking for ways to improve facilities for skaters. The rink is used every day of the week, from 05.30 until 01.00 the following morning. Rink Manager, Alan Hankin, said that his timetable is jam-packed and he must balance demand and supply, but from October some beneficial new plans will be put in place.
Action 1
Training ice (patch ice) schedules will be evaluated to make the sessions more productive and achieve a balance between all competitive grades and the non-competitive social skater.
Action 2
Skaters will have improved use of state of the art off-ice facilities within the Spectrum complex. A personal trainer is to set up a fitness training programme in the gym for competitive skaters, whether dancers or figure skaters. They will also be given enhanced use of the dance studios in the complex to practice their routines off-ice when the rink is being used for other purposes.
To supplement this, various international experts at the top of their fields of dance and movement, have been brought in by the youngsters’ coaches and supporters for off-ice master coaching sessions.
Action 3
This is already in place, and will ensure that there is a wide range of coaching talent with aspiring young level one coaches for beginners right up to very experienced level five coaches.
What is needed now
Now that Guildford Spectrum’s rink management have put together these impressive plans for up to twenty competitive skaters, more outside skating assistance is needed to bring the skaters up to Junior and Senior standard and to a lesser extent Novice standard.
Understanding the IJS is complex even for the experts, therefore all Spectrum coaches need to work with NISA so that an interchange can take place between those that set the standard (technical experts and judges) and those trying to meet a standard (the competitors and their coaches).
Obviously, NISA must use its scarce resources as economically as possible. However, it is hoped that master classes may be arranged with one or more of the UK’s skating technical experts in the same manner as has been done so successfully at Guildford with non-skating international experts.
This is fundamentally a longterm plan and needs discussion. It is to be hoped that technical experts and senior judges might visit rinks, like the Spectrum, before the skaters come to the competitions. Naturally, post-mortems during and after the events will be needed for Juniors and Novices to comprehend what will be expected of them for the Olympics in 2014 or even the Junior Grand Prix in 2009.
With a longterm plan Team GB did so well at the 2008 Olympics so there is no reason why ice skating cannot achieve the top medal places at the Winter Olympics in one or more of the skating branch.
We must be grateful that Spectrum has set the ball rolling so now we may call for some more action.
Article written by John Baster.
