A Bridgewater coach is taking her ice skating expertise to China where she'll be teaching the skill set for the next couple of months.

 Christine Donovan will be a guest coach at the Aberdeen Marina Club, a prestigious private haven in Hong Kong primed with restaurants, banquet venues and sports facilities.

 Where Ms Donovan and her students will be gliding the ice is located on an upper floor of the club, overlooking the marina. She starts work February 8.

 "I don't know what my schedule is but my understanding is you can work as much as you want," the 27-year-old coach said in a recent interview. "It will be full time, though."

 While she'll have a contingent of her own students, she'll be filling in for other coaches who may be away.

 She'll be teaching a learn-to-skate program, advanced figure skating lessons and fundamentals, including power skating, aimed at both hockey athletes and figure skaters. The age groups will vary with students as young as three years of age to skaters in their late teens.

 Ms Donovan is a Canadian certified power-skating coach and a long-time figure-skating instructor. She's been figure skating since her childhood, spending a vast amount of her time cutting the ice in her native New Brunswick at the Kennebecasis Valley Figure Skating Club in Rothesay.

 Later on she juggled figure skating with playing defence for the Saint Mary's University varsity women's hockey team.

 She currently teaches skating part time for the Bridgewater Skating Club. Her full-time work is as an industrial engineer for South Shore Health, which "were gracious enough to grant me a leave of absence," she said, while she works in Hong Kong. Her coaching services are contracted by the marina club.

 One of Ms Donovan's friends went to the region years ago as a guest coach and liked it so much she stayed. It was the friend who found out about the opportunity and relayed the information to Ms Donovan, who jumped at the chance to learn from the backgrounds of a different coaching staff and renew an experience with the culture.

 She was last in Hong Kong in 2005 for a three-week stint working on an industry project related to her engineering degree.

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 "I love teaching skating and seeing [students] progress," she said, "it's something I enjoy doing so much."

posted on 02/02/10