Whitehorse speed skaters were treated to decades worth of experience when visiting coach Debby Fisher was in town last weekend.

The 62-year-old coach flew in from Calgary to spend a weekend working with the Whitehorse Rapids Speed Skating Club.

On a beautiful Sunday morning, the sun streams into the arena, hitting the silhouettes doing lunges in the upper gym before pooling on the ice below.

Skaters pass around the ice thoughtfully performing the drills set out for them by Fisher.

She stands along the mats on the outside of the track, watching their movements with a trained eye alongside coach Phil Hoffman.

“The kids are very respectful,” she says. “They work really hard. They come in and they try to do what I ask them to do.”

Fisher has been coming up to Whitehorse to coach speed skating camps since 1998. In almost 20 years, she’s only missed one, when she broke her leg in 2011 the day before she was due to leave. Sometimes she makes it up a few times in the year as well.

“It’s a real pleasure coming up here and everyone treats me so well,” she says. “I really appreciate the hospitality of the North.”

Fisher’s coaching experience spans decades, and a nation. She grew up out east and moved to Frederickton, N.B. for university. She began a club there 40 years ago.

“I’ve been at it a long time and I’ve still got a lot of passion for it and still enjoy coming up every year that they bring me.”

Fisher is back in the centre of the ice. She holds court with her disciples as buckets of water steam on a platform, ready to be carried around the ice to flood the track.

Fisher speaks with her hands and demonstrates a part of the technique as she holds on to Hoffman with one Team Canada mittened-hand, leaning her body away.

“Speed skating is a really technical sport and requires minute changes in positioning and edges and things like that,” she says. “You’ve got a group of kids up here that are still in their growing stages and as they grow their bodies change and their centre of gravity changes, so it makes a difference. So we have to go back and review a lot of just basic technical stuff and just remind them (and) bring them back into that mindset of gradually picking up that speed.”

Over the weekend, Fisher has been working with two groups of youth, a more developed and experienced group and a beginner group.

She uses lots of games to help the beginner group learn techniques like crossovers, which become unexchangeable when it comes to skating fast.

“They’re doing awesome,” she says of the skaters. “I think they’d been on ice three times already, so they’re doing very well.”

Over the weekend the skaters each got to put in five sessions with Fisher.