Sunday Skate

The Summer Youth League starts July 10 and T will be done with his lessons by then and ready to join a team.

I, on the other hand, will be nowhere near ready. :(  So the little snot’ll be playing before me.

If I could get on the ice more for practice then I might have a chance (snowball’s), but it’s twenty miles to the nearest ice from my house, so once or twice a week is about all I can manage.

So this Sunday, I got a bit better at backward skating and started trying to hockey stop with my left-foot forward.

I suck at that.  It feels so damn awkward … worse than skating clockwise.  I may give up on it and concentrate on other things … I’ll just always stop on my right foot and turn to my left … what’s the worst that could happen?

My daughter came with this time and stopped me at center ice to ask me how to stop.  She skates well, has started skating backwards, but can’t seem to master stopping.  So I tried to explain a snowplow stop.

She understands the premise, but can’t seem to do it, always winding up in a spin because she’s not scraping the ice at all.

So I tried to get through to her with an analogy I, as the father of a fifteen-year old girl, hope can do double-duty:

“The blade needs to start scraping the ice, not slide over it.  Put pressure on the blades.  Try vocalizing what you want to do.

"Now pretend you’re in a car with a boy, put pressure on the blades and say ‘Stop!’”

She found this amusing, but still couldn’t get it, so I suggested she stand in one place and scrape the ice with one blade to see what it feels like.  I demonstrated:

“Stop!” scrape

“Stop!” scrape

“Just like in a boy’s car.

“Stop!” scrape

It’s at this point that I lost my balance and fell on my ass.  Much hilarity ensued.

She still can’t stop.