How College Athletics Are Hurting Girls' Sports by Eckstein Rick;

Author:Eckstein, Rick; [Eckstein, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Hockey as a Threat

The astronomical recent growth of the girls’ youth ice hockey to college pipeline is putting enormous pressure on the occupational viability of figure skating coaches. Kids in general, and girls more particularly, are abandoning figure skating for ice hockey, or never even trying figure skating. As mentioned in chapter 1, PSA leaders are keenly aware of this shift, and executive director Jimmie Santee has written frequently about it in the association’s bimonthly publication, PS Magazine.14 This has led to tougher times for figure skating coaches. Ironically, perhaps, the declining occupational vitality of figure skating coaching is being compensated for by a rise in demand for hockey skating coaches, often called “power skating” coaches. Donna Helgenberg is a longtime figure skating coach (from a family of coaches) who recently made the transition to power skating coach. Business is booming, much of it from girls who have left figure skating or who decided not to try it despite being drawn to skating:

I always made a living as a skating coach. How many industries are there when you can walk out of high school or college and start making over $100 an hour doing something you really like? If you can get the work. I started seeing about five to ten years ago that there was huge drop-off in the number of kids who were sticking with figure skating. They were maxing out, aging out, and moving on with their lives. There were fewer skaters, yet the number of coaches were the same. The ratio of coaches to skaters was just ridiculous. Even with the strong rules against poaching there was a lot of it going on. I had always loved hockey and played hockey, but saw that a lot of hockey players were bad skaters. You could always tell which girls had moved over from figure skating since they were by far the best skaters, even if they didn’t know what to do with a puck. So I thought it would be sensible to start concentrating my teaching on hockey players. At first I had about a 50-50 split with figure skaters and hockey. Then it moved to 75 percent hockey and now that’s all I do. The demand is ridiculous. It’s almost an unlimited supply of kids who need to be better hockey skaters. And as the number of [figure] skaters continues to go down and the number of coaches stays about the same, it’s going to get ugly. People are starting to struggle making a living as figure skating coaches. Why not supplement your income with some power skating lessons? It’s a great side business. I do it as my main business but you don’t have to. There’s still a battle among coaches and rinks about figure skating versus hockey but it seems to be softening.

Summer hockey camps, generally for boys, have been historically concentrated in cooler climates where hockey has more popularity. That is starting to change, although more slowly than you might think given female ice hockey’s growing youth sports to college pipeline.

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