IceOnline and Kim Wilson, author of website 'Skating in Victoria' and promoter of the Melbourne Figure Skating scene has collaborated to bring you up to speed with the people of Melbourne's desperate and as-of-yet ignored by any majojr figure who could make a difference, skating dilemmas. Lack of ice rinks, ice time, ice quality and other resources is crippling this huge city from turning out champion level figure skaters, please read on to get informed!

What's a skater to do in a city of 3 million people with one small rink?

• Introduction

“Is there actually a rink in Melbourne ?”This is the question that I get asked so often when I tell people I skate. But with the current state of our sport here, it is little wonder people don't even know a rink exists. My name is Kim Wilson. I am an adult figure skater living in Melbourne , Australia who has been involved in the sport for 12 years. I would like to tell you about the problem with ice sports in Melbourne but also the efforts to promote the sport.

What is Melbourne 's Rink Situation? Melbourne , Australia . A city with a reputation for being sports mad. It has the Melbourne Cricket Ground (100,000 seating capacity), the Melbourne Park Tennis Centre (where the Australia Tennis Open is held every year) and will be host to the the 2006 Commonwealth Games (for which many sporting facilities are currently being built or upgraded). And it has just one ice skating rink for a city of 3 million people. That is the Olympic Ice Skating Centre, based about 40 minutes from the Central Business District. It is on a main road and does have a bus that goes past so it has quite a visible presence. But it is a ¾ Olympic sized facility which is 30 years old.

With the closure of two rinks earlier this year, the city has now been left with one facility to cater for all the ice sports. The National Ice Hockey league team Melbourne Ice only manager to practice once a week (or every 10 days, depending on ice availability). The speed skaters get one hour of ice time on a Sunday night. And the curlers cannot even practice because of the poor ice conditions (they go to a rink in the country city of Bendigo which is about 2 hours from Melbourne ). And then you have your regular ice hockey competition with all it's various divisions and leagues, including the Women's Ice Hockey. Plus the rink runs public sessions, which of late have been extremely busy (the last school holidays people were turned away because of the demand). So this might give you some idea why we cannot cope with just one rink in a city of our size.

Fortunately the figure skating sessions have been retained at the usual times of Monday, Wednesday and Thursdays from 4.00pm to 7.30pm . But then if you are not only competing at competitions, you are having to compete for space to practice programmes, jumps and spins amongst up to 20-30 skaters of different levels and abilities. One Wednesday night session saw 60 people take to the ice. Skaters are getting very frustrated and it is little wonder that we are unable to produce top national skaters with the current conditions. And, recently the ice has deteriorated to a point where it is becoming unskateable. Along the sides of the rink are lower than the center of the ice. You can actually stand at the barrier and just let gravity take control. And because the zamboni can't cut this part of the ice, it is like skating down a gravel road. There is no really part of the ice that is flat. Now compare this situation to Sydney (home of the 2000 Olympic games). Sydney has 5 or 6 rinks of Olympic size, with modern facilities and good ice conditions. When our skaters go interstate, they might hear the Sydney skaters complaining about the ice not being quite right. They just laugh and tell them how lucky they are. We would sacrifice our skating boots just to get what they have (but then would have nothing to skate with!).

• But now the positive news.

Okay in my former life I must have been a circus entrepreneur. I love to promote. Previously working in a public library, my role was that of publicity and organising events, and outside work I did the same thing being involved with an amateur theatre company.

My philosophy of publicity is:

•   My main aim is to get “bums on seats”.
•   I go by the adage that any publicity is good publicity (even a rink closing). If the words “ice skating” get mentioned in any public forum then that is good because it puts the concept in people's mind.
•   You need to “spoonfeed” people. I hate it when someone tells me they didn't hear about it because no-one told them. At least if they are told they can't complain that they didn't attend because they didn't know.

So currently I have a very active (unpaid) role in helping to promote and publicise skating. Over the last 12 months, when I unofficially took on this job, the aim was to increase the numbers in our skate school. But since then, there has been snowballing effect, where even the mainstream media have responded to my constant email outs (don't you love email!). Good liaisons have been established with a local radio sports programme, the local newspapers and a state politician who is concerned about our plight. And what results from this. After sending out a number of emails to one major Melbourne radio station over a number of months, they rang me out of the blue to ask if we would like their Black Thunders (cars with their logos painted all over) to come down to one of our Family Fun Days. And from my email-outs, another major radio station interviewed one of our judges about our state championships.

One of my greatest concerns with publicity was the lack of a website to promote figure skating in Melbourne and the state of Victoria . If I wanted to go overseas or interstate how could I find out where to skate? Look on the internet of course. But there was nothing to help people find out this information if they were coming to Melbourne . Our state association didn't have a website (and still doesn't) so I took it upon myself to do fulfill this role.

I was keen to learn website development anyway, and saw it as a great opportunity to work on my own computer skills. As I already had a tape trading website and a website for my own skating products Cool Cat Skating Products, this was another website to work on, but one which had great importance. The aim is to keep the website basic and straightforward, but it is important to keep it up to date. The main goals of the website are:

• To promote the sport of ice skating
• Give information about where people can skate (particularly learning to skate)
• Advise of activities, events and competitions (and further to that, how to get in contact with the right people)
• Provide links and references (if someone else already has the information available why reproduce that on my own webpage)
• Promote the need for another ice sports facility in Melbourne

I use Yahoo Geocities to host the website from. It is a free website service, but the advantage of it is if I decided I didn't want to do it any more, then someone could take it over quite easily.

• So why do I do this?

I love skating and I want people to have the opportunity to do it. What I do is unpaid, but recently when I went for a job interview it was one of the things the people interviewing me asked me lots of questions about. I don't have a marketing degree, I just enjoy doing it and the time and energy to do it (having no kids helps but it is very fulfilling anyway).

I am more than happy to talk to anyone about any of the points I have raised in this article. In fact you might have some really great suggestions that would help me with my website or promotional ideas. I can be emailed on oakleighskate@hotmail.com or check out my website for Ice Skating in Victoria at www.geocities.com/skate_victoria/index.