by Jacquelyn Thayer
I think one thing that coaching has taught me, and also being a freeskater—try to have an open communication with your athletes, asking them questions, because I think we are so inclined to think we’re just drill sergeants and these athletes are just, you know, pawns on a chessboard, rather than trying to get that real human connection and being like “How do you feel today? Why did that happen? Why do you feel that?” Letting them know that they’re also a human who has mood swings who doesn’t want to be here today, who doesn’t want to be in a cold rink. I’m also cold, but you know—remembering that they’re also human beings who are growing and learning and have school and this, and just being more empathetic to their training and them as people. Giving them a little bit more autonomy.– Asher Hill
In a coaching field led by veterans, there are advantages to being the new blood.
“I think being not too far away absolutely gives me a fresher perspective on the movement of the sport and remembering what it’s like to wake up in the morning and not want to go to the rink,” said Asher Hill.
No doubt the discipline and commitment required to overcome such inertia, along with skills like organization and efficiency, translate well to training others. But an added spark can come from what’s sometimes been just out of reach. For all their achievements behind the boards, dominant coaches like Brian Orser and Marina Zoueva never claimed certain prized titles for themselves—and this may provide a little extra impetus.
It’s key, certainly, for Mitch Islam. “I think everybody at my level, you want to be world champion, and falling short of that, you have a little bit of that chip still on your shoulder,” he said. “That is definitely something that motivates me and gets me out of bed every day to get to the rink and bring a passion and intensity that I know is going to bring the most out of my students.”
Equally, understanding the pressures of such goals—and a need for balance—is critical, noted Hill, who aims to teach his students both drive and mental care. “We love the sport and the sport is our livelihood and whatever, but remembering that it is just a sport and we want to do our best every day, but sometimes we just don’t have it, and that’s okay. We can’t beat ourselves up, as hard as that is—even coaches would say that to me growing up, but you’re just like okay, yeah, whatever, you don’t know, shut up,” he said with a laugh. “So you just need to try to reinforce that into your students. Like, I may be screaming at you to go, go, go, go, go, why aren’t you doing this, but at the same time always remember that if you don’t have it, you don’t have it.”
Of course, as duo Anastasia Cannuscio and Colin McManus observed, the demands of the youngest athletes can create other priorities for a coach—and call on additional resources.
“Well, you definitely have to learn patience, depending on the student,” said Cannuscio. “Some will test it.”
“And those students know who they are,” added McManus, as both laughed.
Taking a more serious tone, the two acknowledged the usefulness of their years of international experience. “We know what’s required to be a high level athlete, so we can kind of bring a little bit of perspective to our coaching every day so they really understand what the sport is and how it works, what needs to be done and all that kind of stuff,” continued Cannuscio.
“It’s helpful for their parents, too, I think,” said McManus, likening the competitive journey to a “crazy train” of sorts. “When we have students that hit bumps along the way, we have that perspective to just hopefully get them to see the bigger picture of their skating and what it can do for their life, and not just to get them past a test or have them do well at one competition.”`
ASHER HILL: I had really great coaches that really nurtured my love for movement and feeling the music. One coach I had, Vesna Markovich, she’s still a coach in Skate Canada. She was weird, eclectic, flighty but organized, had a dance background from university, and she was my main coach for a while, so she would incorporate random choreographers I’d never heard about. Like I didn’t know who or what Martha Graham was or Bob Fosse was. So she would incorporate all these things and she did off-ice classes with us at YRSA, where I used to train free skate. So she really helped nurture my love for feeling the music and exploring my kinetosphere. As well as having Carol Lane, Jon Lane, and Juris Razgulajevs as my dance coaches—very structured but at the same time, really embracing your individuality as a skater and not making you look cookie-cutter.
ANASTASIA CANNUSCIO: For me, it’s really understanding that everybody learns differently and there’s always a different way to approach something with a different skater to kind of help them individually figure out how it works and how to learn things, because they have such a different kind of approach on everything.
COLIN MCMANUS: Yeah. I think the biggest thing I took away is that even though we’re in a sport that’s kind of based on—it’s a technical-based sport, there’s a lot of technique, but there’s no right or wrong way to teach someone something. A right way to teach someone something is what’s right for them and what makes it work for them. And I think that that’s something that I took away from Karen [Ludington] and Christie [Moxley-Hutson] is that we get to the end result, but it’s going to be a completely different road for every single skater. So there are a million different ways to teach a three-turn and it’s just exploring, taking the time and being a good coach to know your student and know which avenues to go down to get them to the end result. There’s no one way to do something, and I think that was something we took away for sure. And that, you know, Karen was a very creative thinker always. Very out of the box. So we’re never really afraid as coaches to really jump out of the box with our skaters, because that’s how we were raised.
MITCH ISLAM: I would see it as our foundation was built in Barrie and the skaters that [Alexandra Paul and I] are, at the very kind of basic level, at the very foundational level—that was all bred in Barrie.
In Michigan, I think we learned how to be those very elite athletes. We stepped into a situation with a lot of high-level teams and right away, we learned from that and we saw what kind of training and what kind of focus and intention was put into the training with these top-level teams, and that was an eye-opener for us. I think a big thing from Michigan was pushing through things, getting up from mistakes and disguising mistakes, and pushing on. That was definitely something that we picked up in Michigan, was that sort of drill sergeant mentality.
And then moving into Montreal, Marie [Dubreuil] and Patrice [Lauzon] were very big on sort of connecting to yourself on the ice, and so I think I learned a lot about who I was as a performer and that kind of thing in Montreal. And I think, too, just with where I was at with my career and feeling as though I wanted to kind of wind it down, I learned a lot about resiliency and that type of thing in Montreal.
Recent competitive experience has also proven beneficial for those tackling the challenge of choreography. Hill, with a foundation in freestyle skating as well as dance, has endeavored to meld the strengths of both skill sets in his work for singles skaters.
“I know especially sometimes [choreographers] get very, let’s do this cool move. Okay, now you just come up from your knees, then a knee slide, a hydroblade, now go into a triple loop right now. And they’ll be like ‘I can’t do that,’” he said with a laugh. Firsthand experience has led him to avoid such overambition, while his dance training has helped him train skating skills such as run of the blade and how to efficiently gather speed. Too, his dual discipline background has enabled him to “create programs that have the difficulty, but have the structural integrity for athletes to still do the hard elements [while] trying to push them.”
But the importance of a program as a coherent creative whole—and not simply a loose framework for elements—has been a tougher lesson for Hill to instill.
“What I do find with free skaters—a lot of them are very focused on the elements and the jumps, so the choreography and the skating can go by the wayside very quickly if you’re not hands-on all the time. Sometimes they’ll come back after a few weeks [and I’ll] watch a competition and be like, I didn’t do that! Where’d that come from?” he said with a laugh, noting that troubles training a given element can inspire a quick change. “So I always find you have to gauge your expectations, because it’s always hard as a choreographer, having your vision and being like good, this is it, this is what I want, and then coming back and that vision being kind of gone and you have to reassemble it.”
“As a dancer, I am very hard on the kids I teach or the skaters I teach or do choreography with that you don’t drop choreography,” he continued. “And I always just…if I ever dropped choreography with a partner, I’d get yelled at. You can’t do that. And if you want to be a consistent skater, your choreography and the way you set up into your jumps or elements—everything around it should also be consistent every time.”
Meanwhile, in his first choreographic efforts for young pairs like Mackenzie Ripley and Owen Brawley, Islam found that the greater emphasis on jumps and spins in the freestyle disciplines makes the creative task a little more straightforward than it often is in his work for dance. “And that’s something that I feel I bring to the table for the pair teams, is trying to make those transitional moments more dynamic, more intricate,” he said.
For the retired dancers working specifically with dancers, no experience may be more useful than a thorough grounding in the compulsory patterns, whether preparing novices for competition, helping skaters through tests, or creating and training rhythm dances for juniors and seniors. Islam, Cannuscio, and McManus (as well as Hill) all competed last year’s senior pattern, the Finnstep, in the 2013-14 season. So what happens when a new pattern—in this case, the Tea Time Foxtrot, derived from Natalia Kaliszek and Maxim Spodyriev’s 2015-16 short dance—is introduced for the juniors?
“I will say that the contrast this year is interesting, because with the junior, with the Tea Time, I’ve never done that,” said Islam. “So that was a great example of me having to say, OK, I need to do what I need to do to be confident teaching this dance. So whether that meant going to seminars or getting out on the ice and trying some of the dance, it was kind of a foreign entity to me this year.”
While Cannuscio and McManus didn’t coach any junior teams in 2019-20, they also serve as technical specialists, creating incentive to keep on top of such revisions. “It definitely gives you a much better perspective once you’ve competed [a compulsory or element], because we had to teach some kids the Finnstep this past year, and that was so different because we had competed it in 2014,” said McManus. “So we had the little tips, the little tricks, the little nuances that you figure out when you train it for a season that we were able to offer them, but with the Tea Time we’re starting from scratch.”
Ice dance has seen other, more substantial changes since Cannuscio and McManus’s retirement in 2017, including the introduction in 2018 of new required choreographic elements, like the sliding movement and character step sequence. The best educational tool? Taking to the ice. “We always try to look at all the new stuff and try to skate and figure it out ourselves so that we know it and are comfortable with it to be able to either teach it or call it,” said Cannuscio.
While the duo have mixed emotions about missing out on such elements for themselves, Hill has found them reigniting a love for dance that had waned in the last year. “Just seeing the different movements, I’m super in love with the choreo step sequence that they do now in the free dance,” he said. “It’s my favorite element in skating right now, and I absolutely love it. So even those little things have kind of rekindled my wanting to do some dance choreography.”
Of course, given the challenges of the moment—an uncertain season schedule, rink closures and masked social distancing—the job of choreography has developed a few new wrinkles. Ongoing rink restrictions have kept Islam from resuming that periodic work with pairs, and while his younger dance teams completed new programs prior to March’s lockdown, discussion of options for the older teams had to wait until May, when Canadian COVID-19 cases trended downward and conditions in the Barrie area were favorable. “Protocols were laid out: coaches and athletes wearing masks, coaches giving the two meters to the athletes, and lots of sanitizing,” he said. “Once consent was given, Alex and I got started right away with choreography.”
“The process, while different, was actually a lot of fun and in some instances, we found teaching the choreography much easier in shoes than on skates,” he continued. “Our skaters have conveyed, too, that learning new choreography on the floor is actually much easier than on skates. Conversely, there are particular elements and transitions that are much easier to create when you can glide.”
For McManus, who recently launched an Instagram account dedicated to his choreo work, the period has proven surprisingly advantageous.
“So I did a couple calls while the rinks were closed just talking about music and general program layouts, but for me the real work didn’t start until the rinks opened up again,” he said. “I was just very fortunate to have some great skaters who were skating at the rink I was starting to teach at, and they approached me about doing a program for them. So it was about being in the right place at the right time. Never thought I would be able to grow my choreo business post-pandemic, but it has really taken off.”
And timing is, in the end, critical to the successful transition from competing to coaching and choreography—making the move when on-ice experience is current, credibility apparent.
“I think one of the great things about jumping into coaching after my career was that I felt valued, and I’m not sure I would find that in any sort of other career path,” said Islam. “I think, just thinking back to when I was an athlete, definitely having people around you that have been there, walked the walk, you connect to that. You know there’s a shared kind of path that this person has taken and you trust what their advice and feedback is going to be for your journey. And so that, I feel, is something that I’ve noticed early on in my professional career, is that people do trust what you have to say because you’ve been there.”