The Westlock Figure Skating Club could be hanging up its skates for the last time if no new executive members sign up at the April 27 AGM.
The club needs to fill all five positions on its board and hire a Skate Canada certified figure skating coach, “the pro,” or it would fold in the next few months. The AGM will take place at the Rotary Spirit Centre at 6:30 p.m.
“The board is really what we need right now,” said club president Denise Boulerice. “We need people who are actually at the arena for figure skating and can talk with the pro and the helpers. There are a few pieces that need to come together, starting with a new volunteer board.”
Boulerice and a few other members will be stepping down as their children have joined other figure skating groups, so they are looking for a president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer-registrar — the treasurer-registrar position could be split into two roles if enough volunteers sign up. There are other vacant positions like the carnival chair and test chair, which were nixed because the club lacked manpower and older skaters.
The executive meets four times a year: before registration, after registration, after Christmas and at year’s end.
“We’ve kind of been the same small group of four so it’s very bare bones,” she noted.
The board is responsible for registration, the budget and insurance while the planning and lessons are left up to the pro, who is a paid instructor.
If the club can’t find a pro by June, it will disband. Once again the club finds itself in the same dire spot as it was last year, without a coach.
“We were struggling to find a coach right up to the end of September and our ice time started Oct. 1,” Boulerice recalled. “We weren’t giving in and we were talking to other organizations about how we could make this work and finally somebody was able to move things around and say, ‘I can help you out.’”
The pro that helped out last year had moved to a different community for work commitments and another pro temporarily stepped in partway through the year.
“They travelled from Gibbons from Christmas on so we could continue — one of our past pros — but that was more of a favour than anything,” she said.
Part of the problem with keeping a coach is the ice times, which are slotted between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. and often conflict with work schedules.
As well, coaches need to have fulfilled a number of requirements, skills sets and achieved a certain level in their dances with Skate Canada. Figure skaters who aren’t registered can take a course to become certified with Skate Canada.
“For figure skating you need an actually certified paid coach, it’s not like all the other sports where you have volunteer coaches or parents,” she noted
As a result, the Westlock figure skating program has devolved into an entry-level skating program.
In the past, the STARSkate and JumpStart programs were available to older kids and lessons were Mondays and Wednesdays.
“There is a need for it, it’s just the manpower that we need some help with,” Boulerice said.
Currently, Learn to Skate and CanSkate were the only programs offered this year on Wednesday nights.
The Learn to Skate program for 3 to 5 years old and CanSkate for 5 to 8 year olds focuses on the skating basics. Last year around 20 kids participated in the CanSkate program.
“It certainly does serve a purpose of teaching kids those basics of getting up and starting to move so they can move into hockey or skating at school or public skating,” she said. “It’s something a Canadian child should know how to do. We have a lot of kids in our community take the hockey route and this helps them not lay on the ice for the first month of hockey.”
