Anne Stromberg
March 6, 2018 01:08
My 12 year old son took the Jr. Parkour class at the SLC location for a month. It was not at all what we expected... I thought he might learn Parkour.
Pros:
Facility - We were really excited at first because the facility is great. They have quite a lot of obstacles/equipment to climb, swing or flip from with plenty of soft landing area.
The Office staff is great to work with. The were friendly and helpful and made quitting the class quite easy.
Cons:
The coaches! The coaches were horrible! First of all, they stretched for 20 MINS of the 55 minute class. That is over 1/3rd of the time! I understand how important warm-ups are - I am a dancer - but that is a little ridiculous. Then they ran drills and would show the kids what to do in a 20 second DEMONSTRATION - (not instruction), and then said "Now you do it, go!" Wait-What!?! How is my son supposed to do a front flip if you don't tell him HOW to do a front flip? Or a back flip, or a side flip, or a back-handspring, or numerous other moves that have fancy names that I watched but couldn't remember. My son came away from one class with a black eye because he kneed himself in the eye trying a back-handspring without instruction.
The "coaches" would also occasionally jump in to the drill rotation as kids would take their turns just to show off what they could do. There was even a part of one class where the coach was challenging the kids to do things that he, himself couldn't do, and bartering their free time based on how many of them could accomplish this near-impossible task (which was none of them). These guys - the coaches - don't know how to teach or control a class full of 10 boys. Even though they pretended to run drills there was chaos the whole time. Half of the class would wander around the gym playing on whatever equipment was nearby.
Lastly, there seemed to be no plan for what would be done each class. They seemed to make up things on the spot, which didn't always work and they spent way too much time setting up their obstacles. If they had planned beforehand, much of the standing around could have been avoided (which is partly why the boys were so comfortable playing around when they should have been following "instructions" )
I could only stand to watch 4 classes. We ended up buying some gym mats to use at home and it turns out YouTube has quite a lot of instructional videos.