LEARNING TO SKATE... AND LEARNING TO FALL DOWN

Ashlee Hale wants her beginning ice-skating students to pay attention to the noise their skates make. If they hear scratching sounds, they aren't on their skate's edge. "The best skaters don't hear anything at all," she says.

If they keep at it, Hale is going to teach these girls some other lessons skating taught her.

"I was taught to be a proud winner and a gracious loser -- a very big lesson," she says.

One of mothers assembled to watch her daughter's Saturday morning lesson at The Ice in Cape Girardeau terms skating "a healthy obsession." Dawn Vehrs drives her 9-year-old daughter, Tierney, from their home in Marble Hill to Cape Girardeau two or three times a week for skating. "That's all she talks about -- skating," Vehrs says.

Tierney's heroes are Kristi Yamaguchi and Tara Lipinski. "That's all I hear about," Vehrs said.

Hale began learning to skate when she was 9, a bit late to become a Lipinski. That wasn't necessarily her goal. She had allergies, so the clean, dry environment of the skating rink was preferable to dusty dance floors or chalky gymnastics mats.

Hale was a competitive skater until the age of 14, and in 1990 won an Ice Skating Institute of America national championship in Dallas, Texas. Now she coaches the skating rink's figure skating team. She put herself through college and graduate school by teaching skating, and next semester will begin teaching freshman composition at Southeast.

Her master's thesis was titled "Reflections on Ice."

In school, so many of a student's goals are set by his or her parents, Hale says. "Skating teaches self-confidence and the ability at a young age to set a goal and achieve it."

Though this is a class for children at the beginner level, Hale already has them doing Arabesques and spins. "I like to keep them interested," she explains.

There is no right age to begin skating, she says. One of her students began learning when she was 50. Another skater at the rink, Madison Thompson, just turned 1. Many children take to skating very easily. "We have kids who started in April who are turning axels," she says. An axel is a jump of 1 1/2 revolutions landed in the opposite direction on the opposite foot.

Hale herself wasn't an athletic child. "I wasn't agile. I was a girly girl." But skating is different from running or throwing a ball. "You slide, and it doesn't hurt that badly when you fall," she says.

It's important to Hale for ice-skating to be synonymous with smiling for her students. Attitude is the most important thing -- "I really want to be here," she says.

If a child cries while getting on the ice, Hale lets her walk around awhile. "It is a very different feeling to be gliding," she says.

All six of these students are girls. Boys usually switch to hockey once they learn to skate, Hale says.

Six-year-old twins Cedar and Shyah Buero have been coming to The Ice from Tamms, Ill., since May. Their mother, Debbie Williams, says they've been watching skaters on TV since they were 2 years old. Predictably, they made a tandem decision to learn to skate. "They always want the same thing," Williams said. "They're very competitive."

A single mom, Williams works overtime so she can take off early to bring the twins to private lessons.

Though only 6, Ashley Diemer is in Hale's advanced class of three girls learning spins and jumps. Ashley, a first-grader at Clippard Elementary School, began taking group lessons at age 4. She doesn't want to play any other sports at the moment.

At the Show Me Games two weeks ago in St. Louis, the skaters brought home many prizes, but Diemer likes the megaphones they took to the games more. "They end up becoming friends and cheering for each other," she said.

Through skating, she sees her daughter learning "to get out in front of people, and how to win and lose gracefully."

Vehrs says she pushed her daughter into the other activities. Skating was something Tierney wanted to do on her own. "I have to hold her back a little," Vehrs said.