Throwing Chickens
One week during our regularly scheduled adult Learn to Skate group class, our coach was teaching us about edges. At one point in the class, he asked us to raise our arms and make them ballet-like (high 5th position). Being Ukrainian, our coach is sometimes hard to understand. He mumbled something when he asked us to raise our arms up during the edge exercise and we had no idea what he said.
I turned to one of the other skaters and said, “Did he just say to throw the chicken?” Cue confused looks from the rest of the class. “Throw the chicken? What?”
We then asked the Ukrainian coach if he said to throw the chicken. As he was laughing, he said no. The rest of us laughed so hard that some of us started crying, including the coach.
Little did we know that this was the start of an epic movement.
Everything we did was centered around ‘throwing the chicken.’ We sent each other chicken memes and even called ourselves the #bocksquad. Chicken throwing has been an ongoing joke ever since that class, and it even made a very prominent appearance at adult nationals. Here is a sign I printed out for my fellow skaters:
I gave t-shirts to a few of my fellow chicken throwers as tossies. The fronts said #bocksquad while the back had a skating chicken with “Throwing chickens since 2017.”
One of our skaters gave us these amazing tossies after our performances:
We lovingly named them Sir Bocks-a-Lot (on the right), who is a wannabe rapper, and Jumpin’ Joe Sa-bock-chick, who is his BFF. These are our new club mascots.
So if you see us clucking around at future competitions, understand that it is meant to make you laugh and calm your nerves. It worked for all the other skaters who were asking about our chicken obsession. We got a lot of laughs along the way, which made us very happy.
Watch out for the poultry posse!
