Thanks for all the feedback guys.
JoeCool, it will be the lowest level adult league I can find! Right now I am just asking for information. I need to take care of some personal issues before I can dedicate myself to this fully.
One thing a skating instructor once told me years ago. She told me to learn ice skating on figure skates and once you can skate on figure skates then switch to hockey skates. Do you guys agree?
This sounds basically very stupid. As below...
The rockers of the blades between the two are actually quite different, so you end up with completely different strides and stances. I could see in some respects in terms of developing your balance and body awareness to start in figure skates, but that'd more be an overall long term plan thing.
If you're wanting to be ready in 5 months, you'll want to stick with hockey skates - but see if you can find an adult learn to skate program to join to get the ice time and skating technique taught.
The completely different rockered cut of hockey skate blades, along with the extremely different boot make trying to learn to skate as a hockey player by using figure skates basically pretty stupid. But that doesn't make that sort of instruction a bad idea at all.
As a kid, i took a ton of powerskating lessons from an instructor with a figure skating background (a lot of top power skating instructors are from that skating tree because they're extremely attentive to nuance and detail in skating strides and motions, edge control, efficiency, coming from a background where those sort of things are literally judged always). There are some real telltale signs of a figure-skating related background when you watch a lot of really good skaters i think. But in my experience, never once was it suggested that i should be learning with figure skates though...that would be a red flag for me.
But if you want to see the potential benefits of a figure skating background to your skating instruction...Jeff Skinner is the poster boy for that kind of stuff.
Or just watch a highlight video of Skinner like this...don't watch the play, just watch Skinners feet...that's what traces of figure skating in a hockey player look like, and it ain't too bad.