I'd like to encourage everyone to keep working on the Laura Stamm power skating skills and maneuvers whenever possible.
The more you do these skills, the more your muscles will remember how to do them. You will end up skating faster and improving your stride without even realizing it! The Laura Stamm skills testing is an optional test taken during the regular power skating clinic. It is not really a test in itself, but more of a skills evaluation. How the testing works is one of the on ice instructors will take the student aside and give them a series of maneuvers to attempt during the regular clinic.
These tests are basically a way of going through our clinic and making certain that you can master several maneuvers of a certain difficulty to a particular level of skill. These students will get extra individual attention in particular areas of the test if they seem to be having problems and will be helped/re-taught how to do the particular skill until it is at a level of satisfactory with the level of the test. Also, these tests are a way of knowing how far up a student will stand in the Laura Stamm skating clinic compared to our highest difficulty of skills we teach and what they have left to learn. As a student gets higher up in the testing ranks the skills in these tests become much harder. And in the higher level tests the students will need to do maneuvers which are far above the skill of a regular clinic and are then privately taught how to do those techniques.
The way the skill level on these tests work is they are designed for people who have been to the clinic for a certain number of years. For example, first year students get the basic A stick and require no testing. The basic AA stick is designed to be at a skill level of a student who is coming to the clinic as their second time. The intermediate A test (or third achievement rank) is designed for students who have come to the clinic for their third time and so on. So, as you get higher ranks, the tests become significantly harder than the previous one. There are some exceptions to this rule though. If someone comes to our clinic and is already at a higher skill level then we might test them for certain tests their first year, or if someone improves greatly their first year, their second year might be tested for a higher test. This is how some people can skip a test. This can only be done once.If a person is at the skill level of intermediate AA one year, it is unreasonable to expect that person to be able to pass the advanced AA test (two ranks above intermediate AA, skipping adv A). This is because the test will be significantly harder than the test two ranks below it. If you are not sure what level your first test should be for, ask the instructor what you should be testing at. Then the next years you will end up testing for the very next rank up and proceed in the original order.
This can be done by checking the list of skills on the Skills Test Videos. Simply check the test you intend to take next year and make sure you can accomplish those maneuvers with the skills that the test describes. These can easily be practiced at open skate or at the warm-ups of a team practice.
Skills testing is available at all of our clinics. Check with the instructor or the person working the display table during the clinic to sign up for testing or to ask questions about testing.
by Alan Noble, Program Director