Each time her sharp silver blades step onto crisp, freshly cleared ice, veteran figure skating head coach Kari-Ann MacDonald still gets a rush, she says.
“I love it,” she says. “There is not a day that I don’t love teaching skating. It is not a job. It is what makes me happy, it’s my passion.”
MacDonald, a STARSkate, CanSkate and CanPowerSkate coach, first put on figure skates and headed out to lessons at six years old at the rink in Powell River, her hometown.
“My uncle married a skating coach,” she recalled to The Chief. “He bought me a dress and told my mom it was time I learned to skate. I remember being really excited.”
She entered her first skating competition at nine years old.
Her first coaching job was in Houston, B.C. in 1986, and in 1993 she moved her family to Squamish, where she stepped on the ice with the Squamish Skating Club.
She has never looked back.
“I can teach a child to do something and see the success in the child… and share my love for the sport and see it grow,” MacDonald said, explaining what she loves about coaching.
Squamish skaters can begin lessons as young as two years old and CanSkate programs can take adults who want to learn as well.
Squamish mom Kerri Gray put her three-year-old daughter Kendall into skating lessons almost two years ago.
“I think it is important to know how to skate,” Gray said. “She really loves it, she looks forward to it every Saturday morning.”
Many of the Squamish Skating Club skaters look forward to the annual Christmas show. This year’s theme was “Santa’s Small World” and performances were held Dec. 9 and 13. The shows are the club’s biggest fundraiser of the year.
“I still believe in making it by donation,” MacDonald noted, adding she wants to see as many people in the community come to the two shows as possible.
Young skater Lucie Perron, 5, was a lion and a monkey in the ice shows.
She started skating this year. Her favourite part is “skating with the drawings,” when the coaches draw on the ice and the skaters follow the lines, she said.
She is working hard at learning to jump backward, she noted.
While Lucie asked to take skating lessons, her dad, Rob, told The Chief he grew up playing hockey and so also wanted his daughter to have the opportunity to feel the sense of community the local ice rink can provide.
The family has found that rink-community in spades, he said.
Because the skating lessons for Lucie were scheduled for Wednesday nights and her parents work late, they originally thought they would have to forgo lessons this year, but members of the Squamish Skating Club quickly stepped up to help.
“What has happened now is we have had people… that we don’t even know offering to get her to skating,” her dad said. “It is kind of that thing where people pull together because a little girl wanted to go skating.”
Things haven’t always been easy for the club.
“We went through a real downslide in 2005-2009. We came close to closing the doors,” MacDonald said. “I worked very hard to keep the club going and we ran with no money in the bank, but now we are flourishing, which is nice.”
Squamish’s increasing population of young families has led to an increase of skaters at the club.
About 225 skaters were signed up last year, according to MacDonald.
For skaters of all kinds, ice time is an issue in Squamish and MacDonald and others have been calling for a second sheet of ice for years, she said. Members of the club sometimes have to head to Whistler to get more ice time, but they manage, she added.
In her more than three decades of coaching, some other things have changed in the world of figure skating, such as the costumes.
“They have evolved a lot. They have gotten a lot glitzier and the spandex is so amazing,” she said, with a laugh.
She recalled her early costumes that didn’t have any stretch to them at all.
Squamish Elementary School student Malia Stuart, 10, competes in the pre-juvenile U11 category. Though she represents the Vancouver Skating Club at competition, she started out with the Squamish Skating Club when she was five years old and still joins the club on the ice twice a week. MacDonald was her coach until this year.
On average, competitive skaters range in age from eight to 18, according to MacDonald.
Stuart said she likes gliding and jumping best.
She was recently chosen to be one of the 18 young skaters who will be a flower retriever for the upcoming Canadian National Championships to be held in Vancouver, in January.
“I am really excited,” she said.
Registration for the next regular Squamish Skating Club session starts Jan. 8.
MacDonad’s support staff includes dance coach Mike Whitehead, Kelsey Lovell, and her daughter, Brittney-Anne Jordan.
Jordan, 27, who has been a coach since her teens, says that if a parent is considering putting their daughter or son into figure skating, they should go for it for many reasons, not least of which is national pride.
“I just think it is a Canadian thing to do,” she said. “Learn to skate and learn to swim are the two biggest things that you can teach kids. You put a soccer ball in front of a kid, they will learn to kick it themselves, but put them in the water and they don’t know how to swim yet; put them on skates and they don’t know how to stand and skate.”
Jordan added that through her time skating, she learned the value of friendships and respect for other people.
“As much as it isn’t a team sport, you learn to work together. You learn to share the ice… When you compete, you are the only one out there, but leading up to competitions, you have to share all of your space so you learn to respect everybody else.”
For more on the club, go to squamishskatingclub.ca/ or call the club’s registrar, Crystal Tress at 604-848-1249.
