World and Olympic coach Audrey Weisiger shares some of her tried and true motivational methods she uses to constantly push her skaters to train harder and to break through training plateaus. Audrey says, “One of the things I’m a firm believer in is you criticize privately and you reward publicly.” All of the motivational methods in the video have some aspect of a public reward and acknowledgement within the environment of the home training rink.
To start the video, Audrey honks “The Horn” to demonstrate how skaters can get public recognition for a clean program run-through. She says, “I believe that some skaters have worked and worked and worked in this building just so they could honk the horn.” She also talked about how hard skaters work for a chance to ring a cowbell which was used for the Men’s draw at the Olympics. Audrey notes that we often forget that we are working with children who often just need immediate gratification and recognition.
Next, Audrey shares the concept of “The Suitcase” which skaters get to open publicly and select an item from after attaining a skill for the first time. The Suitcase is filled with a wide variety of things that skaters may want, and the skater can choose anything. Audrey opens The Suitcase for us to give you some idea of what might be inside.
The final idea that Audrey shares is called “Hundred Dollar Friday” and this can of course be modified to any amount that could be motivating at your rink. The idea is that on a random Friday, a coach comes out and tapes a one hundred dollar bill to the plexiglass which can be won by any skater who lands a new double axel of new triple jump (or quad). As you can imagine the level of focus and effort can go up exponentially on a Hundred Dollar Friday. But Audrey stresses that coaches need to be smart in terms of how they implement this so that is complements the overall training goals in the rink.
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