ABOUT KITE LAB, A KITESURFING SCHOOL WITH PEOPLE THAT YOU’D LIKE TO MEET ON YOUR HOLIDAYS
Kite Lab is managed by three individuals:
Magda, founder of Kite Lab in 2017,
César, a passionate kitesurfer for over 20 years (co-runs Kite Lab since 2019),
and Aga, and amazing spot manager (since 2020)
The Kite Lab instructor team is a fantastic group of various personalities.
Everyone has a different and unique history, each one has a different character, but they have one in common: they like their job and they can do it well.
GROUND HANDLING
Magda is your person in Sicily – when it comes to organization, communication and help with anything you may need.
She sleeps with a calendar under her pillow, dreams only of kites, and awaken in the middle of the night, she has answers to all questions.
She will always be happy to tell you which places are worth visiting, give you the addresses of the best restaurants and give you ideas for free time activities.
One of her main professional duties is sending all kinds of pins, links and contacts.
Her role is also to provide the school with everything needed for it to work perfectly, and to ensure a high level of service
– from equipment and accessories (shopping and regular replacement of all things),
through a wide accommodation base and a self-developed system of quick scanning it for finding best accommodation options,
to a network of contacts with local suppliers of all services, and that in practice turns out to be extremely useful on a daily basis.
She pays great attention to details, tidbits and small accents. She sometimes has a tendency to impractical perfectionism and can lose track of time while talking about any topic. Fortunately, Magda’s healthy counterweight is César and Aga, who think practically, are quick and specific in their actions.
César is the good spirit of the Kite Lab and the manager of the French part of the school.
He’s a mountain man. He loves nature, outdoor sports, is determined, solid, persistent, talks little and does a lot.
He is a dream leader for the team – sincerely liked and respected, with a calm, witty and very balanced nature.
He is also the school’s handyman (he calls himself the base janitor). If someone is cutting wood in the corner, repairing the compressor, watering the plants, weeding the lawn or repairing a beach chair, it’s definitely César. He built the base himself and improves it every year. He carries out Magda and Aga’s ideas with stoic calm.
He is the main website engineer and is responsible for the school’s online visibility.
César is also a fantastic video editor (armed with all the toys he needs for gathering shots) – you can watch his videos HERE.
Apart from stinky cheese, red wine and baguette (what true stereotypes!), he loves kitesurfing – he has been kiting all over the world for almost two decades.
Aga is the base manager and has supernatural abilities to see, hear and remember everything that happens at school. She also has amazingly impressive resources of energy.
Aga knows at any time, without any notes, which instructor is with which student, where, with what equipment, on which radio channel and at what time the lesson starts and ends. Of the approximately one million items in the school, she knows where each one is, at any given time. She also knows where you left your lost flip-flop, where you hung your towel, what size your helmet is, which harness you used yesterday, or what time you have to finish your last lesson, so you don’t miss your plane (she knows of course what time is your departure).
She creates the schedule of lessons more less like a brilliant composer composes an opera. In mind, quickly and flawlessly.
Aga has legislative and executive initiative regarding organizational rules at the base, and she enforces those rules tirelessly. In fact, it’s impossible not to admit that without her there would most likely be chaos and disorganization. This is an invaluable role. There is order, and order in a kite school is quite an accomplishment…
You can approach Aga with any problem, and you can be 100% sure that she will solve it (probably before you even ask her for it).
THE INSTRUCTOR TEAM OF KITE LAB KITESURFING SCHOOL
Preparing a proper kitesurfing school requires focusing on quite many elements (high-quality equipment, good place, infrastructure, website, marketing & communication and many, many others), but a potential student asked what would be most important for him or her, would probably answer:
– a good instructor.
We are well aware of this and take this issue very seriously.
All our instructors are certified kitesurfing instructors and they have many years of experience. Once we have new ones to the team, we carefully verify their skills and teaching talent. We also often ask for feedback from students.
Many of our instructors have been with us from the beginning or for several years. The most experienced instructors keep an eye on younger ones. We organize regular team meetings (led by instructors with the most experience) so we constantly improve things, enrich the methodology, discuss our work on an ongoing basis, and discuss various situations in the water (so also develop further safety rules tailored to our kiting area).
We have over a dozen instructors.
This number is small enough that we can carefully select them and evaluate them individually at work. We also believe that a team of this size has the best chance of working well together and creating a nice atmosphere at school, which we have been happy to see every season so far.
On the other hand, that number is large enough to allow us to have instructors who speak different languages, to be able to organize lessons for larger groups of students (family / friends) without their classes diverging too much during the day, and to have specialists in various fields.
Of course, every instructor is prepared to teach kitesurfing, but we have specialists in teaching children, in foil, in strapless, and of course in freestyle (some are experts in unhooked, others in old school, and another will probably take on a student with big air ambitions).
We may also attempt to match students with instructors based on personality. For example, students who are very insecure before their classes should have a patient, very experienced instructor, who will approach their emotions methodically. They will not start further tasks until there is certainty that they are fully comfortable with the current points.
And then different students, let’s say who practice many other sports, including some extreme ones, may be motivated to work with an instructor who will stimulate them to make fast progress and break further barriers quickly. These lessons will be loud, more dynamic and full of spectacular crashes.
Each of our instructors is a personality. These are people of all ages, always with an interesting history and with surprising competences in various fields, apart from kitesurfing, of course.
Team members like each other, they are relaxed, smiling, and in a good spirits. Instructors themselves take the initiative for joint activities – cooking or going out together, having open BBQs at our base, going for trips on windless days, and after an intense day of work – having a well deserved drink all together.
A satisfied, relaxed and well cared for instructor is a good instructor.
PATATINA, LUNA AND YERBA – THREE PERSONALITIES ON 12 PAWS
The Lo Stagnone spot is full of doggies. Free-living ones, so basically homeless (and completely harmless) live paw in paw with dogs wearing collars.
They all have their businesses, relationships, likes and dislikes, and unlimited space, which, of course, they all happily use.
Our base is sometimes visited by dog guests (owned by our human guests, or local free spirits, or dogs from other schools), but we have three doggies in our permanent team.
Patatina is a pretty mix of all Sicilian breeds, born somewhere on a kite spot, and is the most local member of the Kite Lab team.
Her role is to: observe the spot, perceive past and future events using her supernatural sense of smell, verify whether this or that stray doggy has the right to temporarily visit the school, and appear in our videos.
She’s cunning and clever, probably because she’s the only one in the trio who’s experienced homelessness, and her genes, we are guessing, come from generations of stray ancestors. She can flawlessly manipulate any person into giving her something to eat (mainly by using a long, piercing and hypnotic look straight into their eyes). She easily works out our guests, bar chefs, as well as random guests of nearby apartments and hotels that she boldly visits.
Due to the above, she has a tendency to gain weight, which is especially noticeable at the end of the season.
She’s moderately sociable and almost always absorbed in her own affairs. She’s the only one that goes away from the base for longer periods of time.
By nature – a hunting hound dog (unfortunately, she is an excellent hunter, birds mainly).
Patatina has been with us since she was a puppy, so since 2018. She understands Polish and the word ‘food’ in all languages.
Luna is our undisputed beauty. Diva, majestic wolf (Czechoslovakian wolfdog).
She has the nature of a guard, and although she doesn’t have much to guard in the open kite spot, she keeps an eye on general order. If she sees two dogs fighting, she will immediately separate them. If some not very clever dog wants to bite her, she’ll let him, even though she could eat him for breakfast.
She is wise, dignified, calm and insightful. And she never leaves her wolf pack, which is us.
She is a senior (born in 2012), although anyone who doesn’t know, will certainly not guess her age. She’s a picture of health and strength.
She understands the Polish language probably in its full, vocabulary and grammatical spectrum.
What undermines her seriousness is the fact that she is very gluttonous and, unfortunately, has a tendency to steal food. She won’t grab it out of hand, but food may disappear from a table or an open backpack. Instead of running around apartments and garbage cans (like Patatina) Luna, logically, takes advantage of the fact that food is regularly brought to the spot, so to her.
Yerba is a border collie, so it’s a herding dog by nature. Due to the lack of sheep, she herds kites. Even though she has been living at the spot for several years, her fixation with flying kites has not weakened. Therefore, her main activity is (at her discretion) either herding the kites or defending the base from them.
Her fur is nice, fluffy, soft, as well as it’s full of various species of grass, algae and burrs. Attempts to control her fur stop after about the first three weeks of the season.
She is very sociable, playful and funny, also she’s the only one able to curb her appetite (although of course she desires your sandwich).
She will be happy to apologize for not her sins and she tries very hard to be a good dog. She likes Patatina, but is a little afraid of Luna.
It is also a Polish-speaking dog.
It’s said that music soothes customs.
At our base, customs are soothed by music and our three girls.
WHAT DRIVES US
Riding the board with a kite in hand is speed, freedom and fun. That just can’t bore us. And we have the urge to share that fun.
We know how to teach you the rules of this game, so you can get to feel on the water exactly what we do.
To us there is nothing more pleasant than the sight of a freshly baked kitesurfer that drifts away from us happily and efficiently, forgetting after 10 meters about our existence and focusing only on what he or she is experiencing.
We believe in kitesurfing – it’s a fantastic, developing sport that is not difficult to learn (!), yet gives a lot of pleasure.
We know our skills as instructors – we have a passion for this sport, enthusiasm for teaching and great satisfaction with the progress of our students.
We love our spot – it really is a perfect place to learn and master kitesurfing, at any level.
And we believe in our students who, like us, value active lifestyle and enriching themselves with new skills.