Inline skating questionnaire results

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The biggest thing that has come out of this is that I believe that skating instructors are overpriced, in the most part. Charging £30 for a 1 hour one-to-one lesson seems a little extreme, unless you are someone who has an extremely good reputation and many years of experience (the top three in the list of well known instructors, coming below). Now that I've thought about it this makes a lot of sense: you're probably paying around £100 for your skates, so why would you pay nearly third of that to learn how to use them?

So I've reduced my prices: my private lessons are now just £20 for an hour long one-to-one private lesson, and my group courses have come down to £10 for an hour-and-a-half lesson. I've done this because I want you to feel like you get value for money.

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The most surprising answers I got were to the questions about video lessons: hardly anyone wants to pay for these! Part of me assumes that this is because people believe that they can get this information free, from sites like YouTube (look for a guy in a nasty looking shell suit wearing aggressive skates for an example of what I didn't have in mind for this!). Personally I think that this is incorrect: yes you can find videos showing you how to do slalom moves, and some that claim to teach you to the basic skating skills, but these are not the same as I was intending. A few minutes of someone doing something, maybe with a bit of slow motion, is not the same as having someone actually explaining the skill and the common faults people make when trying it.

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I think that the questions about years of skating experience and what skill level you think you are, are revealing. Very few people thought of themselves as beginner or novice, even if they'd been skating for less than a year. I'm not saying that if you've been skating for only a short period of time you can't be any better than that; everyone learns at their own pace and so it's perfectly possible. What I think this reveals is that actually trying to box people in this fashion is wrong: you have so many different disciplines in skating (from slalom to street, hockey to roller derby, etc), that you can't simply say that overall someone is a beginner or expert.

What I've taken from this question is that it's better to be goal oriented in my courses. My Sunday Stroll and Street Skater courses are examples of this, where you work towards a goal, and so I'm going to endeavour to do this with other courses that I'll run. I'll be trying to put together a way to guide you from where you feel you are now, to where you want to be.

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Just for the competitive instructors amongst us: Naomi came top, but only by a few votes.

There are quite clearly 3 tiers of instructors, not necessarily based on their teaching abilities. The differentiator, when I look at these results, is that the top three (Naomi, SkateFresh, Mike van Erp) are all very active in the community, and have vast experience. At least one of the comments I received on this questionnaire highlighted this fact and it's clear that this is a big driver in how busy these skate schools / instructors are.

Getting more involved in the community is clearly something I will have to look into myself; experience is only going to come with time.