Denny Morrison Website

Kelly Lapointe- Alaska Highway News

Dozens of speed skaters from the region turned out to the week long Fort St. John Elks Speed Skating Club Summer Long Track Speed Skating Camp at the Enerplex yesterday.

The athletes are learning dry land training from Kristen Harrott of PacificSport Northern BC and on-ice technique from Jacques Thibault, former Olympic speed skater and hometown Olympian Denny Morrison.

"I think it's really cool experience because...we're really learning from the best," said Sarah Graham of the Dawson Creek Speed Skating Club.

This was the first time the Enerplex oval has hosted a summer camp.

"It's tremendous because you'll find the kids this week get 10 hours of ice time, so by the time we start running our programs from the middle of September onward they have had an initial transition from dry land summer training onto the ice so they're through that, they have a lot of their technique tremendously improved, so anything that comes now after is really working on efficient skating and building conditioning, quite a tremendous advantage," said Elks coach

Wim Kok who also used to participate in summer training camps.

"I did myself a couple of summer camps in Calgary and it was amazing when you came on the ice in September, October...it's like 'woah, I can skate, I can fly.'"

When they weren't on the ice, athletes ran various drills to test and improve their conditioning.

Ordinarily at this time, the local skaters wouldn't have an opportunity to practice long-track at the end of August as they used an outdoor oval for long-track.

"I really like it, the ice is good...I like speed skating and it's fun and I wanted to get started early," Elk Rachel Kalkman explained why she joined the camp.

Sylvie Lloyd came to Fort St. John from Kamloops to visit friends and attend the camp.

"I like long-track better than short-track and there's no oval close by, so I decided to come up here," she said, adding that she likes the Enerplex oval and that Morrison is one of her instructors.

"It's pretty cool because he's so good."

This was Morrison's first time coaching a speed skating camp in Fort St. John. He coached camps in Calgary in his 2006-07 and 2007-08 seasons.

"In both those seasons I skated really well and I didn't coach before the 09-10 season and I feel like I lost something because when you tell someone something enough times, it's kind of cool to say here's how you do the drill. I'm practicing myself when I'm demonstrating it," he said.

This was also his first time actually skating on the oval.

"The ice is pretty good...I think it's awesome. The parking lot wasn't paved the last time I was here, they're putting the final touches on and inside looks really good. I think it's a really cool design," he said, looking around the arches outside the Enerplex.

"Quebec has wanted an oval for years, but they never been able to budget in $100 million for an oval, this is a $40 million oval and it has two hockey rinks and a running track, I hope that this oval in Fort St. John, which is a small town, is a stepping stone to be like 'why doesn't Montreal have an oval? Why doesn't Toronto have an oval?' and grow the sport, for cities like that it should be affordable."

Kok said it was nice to have the experienced eyes of Thibault and Morrison coaching on the ice.

"You need people like Denny, like Jacques, that can say immediately this is what needs to be adjusted...it's always nice to hear it from the guru rather than an amateur coach."

The Elks will start their season in mid-September. As opposed to starting with short-track in the fall and moving to long-track in January, the Elks will try training in both disciplines from the start of the season.

"They've not been doing any skating during the summer so you're looking at four and a half months off ice so now they're back on and I think you'll see big improvement by the end of the week," said Kok.

According to the City of Fort St. John web site, the Enerplex official grand opening will be on Oct. 13 when all three floors are scheduled to be completely operational for public access.