This tip comes from Competitive Skater, who keeps two pairs of skate guards
in her bag for competitions. One pair is her wet pair, the other is the dry pair.At a competition, Competitive Skater wears the wet pair (dry at the time) to the rink, removes them, skates, and then puts them back on.
Competitive Skater returns to her skate bag, dries the guards, dries her boots and blades and puts on her dry guards for photos. No rust. Smart girl, that Competitive Skater.
Competitive Skater Dad is even smarter – he got Competitive Skater’s second pair of guards from the rink manager when the manager was getting rid of a year’s worth of lost-and-found stuff.
I scoured the lost-and-found last night: no dice. So, Ice Girl will be getting her second pair of guards at Badger State this weekend. Renee at Rainbo’s bringing them with her – we just have to pick the color. I’m hoping Ice Girl won’t pick purple, but I’m betting they’ll be sparkly.
Update: Ice Grandma popped for the new blade guards at Badger State Winter Games. When I buy guards, I shell out for the plain ol' guards that cost $9 - 13. Ice Girl has had her eye on these cool flashing guards for $25. You know me. I did the math and figured I could buy two pairs of guards instead of one pair of flashing guards. Or, I could buy one pair of plain ol' guards and one hour of ice. Choose, Ice Girl. She totally outwitted me and hit up Ice Grandma instead. Now Ice Girl has flashing guards
(very cool) that require 8 watch-type batteries. They came with batteries, but I'm betting we'll need replacements soon. I did lobby hard for the orange flashing guards, but both Ice Girl and Ice Grandma looked at me as if I were nuts. She chose clear flashing guards - the better to see the cool lights.
7 comments:
Good idea :) Why no purple?
I've banned purple because every kid has purple. Purple, although a beautiful color, causes chaos at rinkside when everyone's scrambling to find their guards.
Me, I like black. Yellow. Orange. No one's going to take those by mistake! :) That's a tough sell, though.
Oh, gotcha :D -I'm a skater, not a mom but I wish my mom was as involved as you are with your daughter! My mom doesn't really like skating..haha ya- I have blue sparkly guards, but a lot of people have those too!! Haha
Get a Sharpie marker and mark your skater's initials along the side of the guards. We have several skaters with the same guards at our rink and they all have their "favorite" place to put them along the boards so this works great to keep track of them.
I love the idea and will do this for our upcoming competition. I shared it with my daugther's coach this weekend and he said - why have I never thought about that.
I like your idea about two sets of guards, but was bummed to see you promoting going to the lost and found for aother set of guards. Girls at my daughter's rink do this when they've left their guards at home, or are missing guards for another reason. The one time my daughter lost her guards we checked the lost and found the next day, but they were long gone.
I realize in your case the rink manager was going to toss the lost and found items anyway. So if you want to contact the rink mamangement, that's one thing, but don't automatically go to the list and found when you need a pair of guards!
Thanks for the comment, Maria. You make a fair point about checking the lost and found - it's a very good idea to make sure that you don't take someone else's guards. It's also a good idea to write your skater's name on the guards with a black Sharpie.
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