SynchroNice / Third Edition / 2018

I have spent my entire life in sports both profes- sionally and as a volunteer and nobody has ever honored me quite as much as Richard and Patricia who, after knowing me for a relatively brief time and an occasional heartfelt meeting at synchro competitions, decided that they wanted to know more about me. If there was a Nobel prize for volun- teer work in sports, they would be most deserving it. I would also like to thank them for putting me in this rather unusual situation – after writing thousands of sport texts, interviews, reports and commen- taries, twenty publications, books and basketball games on radio – I now have to find something inter- esting to introduce myself, as I was asked. Born in Zagreb 64 years ago, I trained in basketball in my early youth, played tennis recreationally until 50 and I still run regularly and participate in all 5 and 10k races in my hometown. I am one of the oldest participants (which doesn’t bother me in the slightest), but I’m certainly not among the slowest (which makes me very happy). But what’s most im- portant and interesting for this story is that I never ever skated. I never tried it, nor was I ever tempted too. The only time I’m ever on ice is in shoes in recent years when we took yearly pictures of teams and club officials for calendars and club booklets, but only then. And I believe this fact, that I never was a skater, was paramount for the role I took in shaping our club and this sport in Croatia. I never wasted a minute looking at the practice with skating exper- tise, I never knew or even cared whether skaters are skating on an inside or outside edge. I did, however put all my effort into the organization for which, without any false modesty, I do consider my- self to be an expert. I took the knowledge I gathered over many years as a sport enthusiast, journalist and editor-in-chief and applied it to synchronized skating. Yes, I was present at practices but not to correct the skating, it was to watch the behavior and atmosphere of skaters and coaches. I vehemently insisted on order, work and discipline and I made sure everything was in order. I was ada- mant on every, even seemingly insignificant, detail. From the first day I insisted that all the skaters dress the same for practice. If a skater showed up with the “wrong” T-shirt, they knew that they would Somebody we highly respect in the world of Synchronized skating and we love to talk to because of his visionary thoughts and opinions and his never-ending patience in explaining all about sports and skating in Croatia is our dear friend Zoran Kovacevic, Vice president of the Croatian Skating Federation, Chair of the Zagreb Snowflakes and former Sports journalist & Editor in Chief for newspapers and sports radio. We asked Zoran to dig into the past, present and future of Synchronized Skating and he gave us his candid insights. have to run home to get the “right” one. That is only one of the ways to create unity and uniformity and skaters from the very beginning knew that they should be as one and that the worth of the team was as strong as the weakest link. Building a team is a “technical” process that needs to adhere to strict rules. Training and skating skills are only some of the components needed to suc- ceed but there are also psychological and sociological components, team atmosphere, information, reactions, clear hierarchy within the club and team – all vital factors to achieve optimal results. There can be no de- mocracy in team sports because it is often abused and leads to anarchy. Rules of organizing team sports already exist; there is no need to “reinvent the wheel” here. You only need to know the “rules of the game” and adjust and improve the sys- tem. For example, in the 2006/2007 season, in advance of our “historical” 16th place at the World Champion- ships in Canada, we added an off-ice coach, doctor and a psychologist to our team. Ten years ago, we already had better organized logistics than many professional clubs that were far richer and more known than us. And it all paid off manifold. Our great off ice coach prepared the team physically, the best Croatian sport psychologist helped the skaters that were very nervous and a leading Croatian sport physician helped a vital teammember with a dislocated knee after the official practice and had her ready by competition time in just 2 hours. In our club we always gathered the best and wanted to learn from the best, all in the effort, of course, to be the best while all the time being aware of our limits and possibilities. For example, the limted number of available skaters (we didn’t have try outs, we often had to convince our skaters to stay in the club for an extra season) and then there was the quite poor infrastruc- ture of only 2 indoor ice rinks in Croatia. I often fondly remember the reaction of our unforgetta- ble first head coach Tina Blat when, in 1998, I told her that our only team at the time, an extremely young and brand new junior team would go to the ISU Spring Cup in Milano 1999. She warned me that the teammight not be ready and I replied “I didn’t say that we MAY be going, I said that we ARE going. “You have 5 months to prepare the team’. I always believed that taking part in big ISU competitions would improve our skating faster, just by looking at and learning from the best. Some in our camp got frustrated because we always finished last. But I felt from the start that we needed to compete and spend time with the best teams and that it was a far better thing to be a small fish in a big pond than a big fish in a small one. If not for that attitude, we might have never met Anu Oksanen (No Jaaskelainen) let alone start cooperating with her in 2003 and we still have a great relationship that lasts to this very day. We have a special relationship with one of the best coaches in the world and one that will last a long time. Anu travels to Zagreb every August and makes new programs for our senior team. Even when she is busy and pressed for time, she finds time to come to us and stays for at least 5 days, working 6 hours a day on ice, to the delight of our skaters and coaches. That is one of the reasons we always have our own coaches and that the senior national team has always been successfully led by Croatian coaches (Kristina Blat, Danka Pivac-Đuraševic, Sara Perl, Sandra Pavicic, KOVACEVIC ZORAN SYNCHRO NICE 119