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Philly Skates brings figure skating’s grace to the gritty inner city.
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In the past, when Marilyn Piety skated at the University of Pennsylvania’s Class of 1923 Rink, she often noticed a cluster of kids watching the freestyle sessions. Did they want to learn to skate, or did they just like watching? Piety wondered.
Then, one morning, two young girls came to her with a question.
“Are you a figure skater?” they asked.
“I answered yes sheepishly, because you feel a bit ridiculous claiming to be one when you’re middle-aged,” she recalls.
The girls were part of the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation. But they really wanted to figure skate. “I don’t like hockey,” said one.
Then and there, Piety vowed to start a skating program for kids in Philadelphia public schools. “I teach the philosophy of sport at Drexel University,” she says. “I have a theory that movement—the sort afforded by sports and particularly music—has a very positive effect on a person’s development.”
Piety’s Philly Skates class starts up again this month at Penn. The program offers a unique and ongoing opportunity to inner-city youth, tracking participants’ performance in and out of school. Once a planned tutoring component is added, it will also provide on-the-job training for Drexel students interested in education or coaching.
For the instruction, Piety has relied on a contingent of prominent figure skaters who, like herself, either train or coach out of the Philadelphia Skating Club and Humane Society in Ardmore. The teaching roster includes current U.S. bronze medallists in ice dancing Kimberly Navarro and Brent Bommentre.
“I often feel so selfish to commit so much time to myself in the form of all the training Brent and I do,” Navarro says. “It’s nice to volunteer. These kids will probably never be Olympic champions—most skaters will never be. But they will learn a lot about self-discipline, courage, confidence and how to pick yourself up after a stumble.”
Plus, says Navarro, “The kids are having a great time in a safe place. I can tell because they smile and laugh a lot—even if their feet hurt.”
Michael Solonoski is also a Philly Skates instructor. He became the national collegiate men’s silver medalist this past summer, when the championships were held in Ardmore. A sixth-year Drexel architecture major, he’s working on his senior project—designing an ice surface along Boathouse Row, plus a small museum to celebrate PSCHS’ early history on the Schuylkill River.
