SynchroNice / Third Edition / 2018

SYNCHRO NICE 157 Well Ozana, we want to know all about you. Hahaha okay, I’m an Aries, what more do you need to know. We for instance would like to know what type of person you are. I think I have a positive attitude and I am a real team play- er, meaning I easily cooperate with others. On the other hand, I’m always late (sorry but it’s in my blood, I think) and if it weren’t for the deadlines I would never finish anything and just keep trying to improve things. But you have a lot of qualities to be a coach? Yes, I do believe I’m a professional, though traditional coach, respectful, caring and compassionate. I work methodically and in a productive manner, but having said that, I am sort of a night owl, or better:morning sleepy head. Did you study? Yes, but like I said, I keep trying to improve things, same with my studies. I’m what you could call a student for life. Where or what? Faculty of Kinesiology. And what was your childhood situation like? Where are you from? I was born and raised in Zagreb and grew up with my mother and brother Dominik (who’s one year younger). My brother is my best friend. We grew up in our family house, with my grandmother and grandfather and my uncle Tomislav (who is just 8 years older than me), so he is more like an older brother. Where or when did your skating career start? I started skating in kindergarten. Later, when I attended university, my old skate-instructor turned out to be my mentor! I always wanted to be the first and the best in my group as a kid but, I also loved helping my coaches with the other kids (like tying their laces, or helping the other kids put their gloves on. I guess that’s where my ‘coaching’ career really began ;). In that period,my instructor told my mom I should definitely join the figure skating club. I continued for the next 13 years in solo figure skating (1992-2004) two seasons at junior level, but at that time, if you were not a good jumper, another discipline would probably be better for you! In Croatia, we never had Ice dance or pairs, but Synchronized Skating was a very young and quite unknown discipline and it wasn’t very popular among figure skaters. Nevertheless, in the middle of high The Zagreb Snowflakes is one big happy family. Teams in all categories and many professional Coaches, one of them is OZANA MILJKOVIC. A very young coach, she’s only 30 years young, but with a lot of skating experience and very passionate about Synchro Skating. Time for a chat! school, I started synchronized skating as senior member of Zagreb Snowflakes. In my third season of skating with the team, I became the team Captain. That’s the season we achieved our best position ever at Worlds in London, Canada in 2007 at 16th place. I am still good friends with some of the skaters from that generation. I skated in 5 Synchronized Skating World Championships, my final one was in Zagreb in 2009. When was your start as a coach? I have been a coach with the Zagreb Snowflakes since the 2007-2008 season when I first helped with synchro school and the novice basic team. In 2010, I started assisting in the senior team and since 2015, I have been coaching the junior team. Starting this season, I’m the head coach of the Junior team and my assistant coach is Nataša Bahat who’s also the head coach for senior team. To complete our team, we have choreographer Ivana Gagro and Tomislav Bišcan for fitness and workout. What can you tell us about the Zagreb Snowflakes or your team? Within the Zagreb Snowflakes, we don’t say “my team” or “your team” we all work together. Each sea- son, coaches rotate with younger categories. So, whether you are head or assistant coaches it doesn’t matter, we’re all still coaching the same skaters. There is no selection procedure for skaters to join because skating is not very popular in Croatia. Still, we manage to have and keep approximately 180 skaters in our Club. This season we have categories in synchro school, pre-juvenile, juvenile, basic novice, novice advanced, mixed age, mixed age beginners, junior and senior level. In the past 3 seasons I have been working with 4-5 different Snowflake teams, so every day is skating day! I don’t have to tell you what I love about weekends. Starting this season, the practice schedule for all Snowflake teams is my new challenge. Even the tiniest mistake can be a catastrophe and my worst nightmare! Just imagine at the beginning of the season, one Sunday morning at 7am, around 40 skaters (plus their parents), all in front of the Ice rink, with no actual ice time! Oooops… I don’t think my cheeks were any redder, ever! However, we made the best of a worse situation and did some off-ice training instead. The senior team that we have now is the youngest group of senior members we have ever had in the club. Half of the senior teammoved up from a younger team this year and 8 of them are the same skaters that I coached in syn- chro school many years back! In this same team, there are also 3 sisters Dora, Klara & Jana Jambrešic skating together – and combined, they have performed over 300 times as Snowflakes, how unique is that? The junior team is made upmostly of the novice advanced skaters that moved up from last year (and are also one of the youngest groups of juniors that we’ve ever had in our club) and we work together very well. Now they are learn- ing brand new elements, within 2 programs during late night practices that go until 11:15pm on school nights! How about practice, can you practice whenever you like ? Unfortunately, not. Our senior team practices only 4-5 hours on ice per week, and 4 hours off ice (for fitness and off ice program practice). So, it is around 10 hours per week. The junior team has 4 hours on ice per week, and 4 hours off ice for fitness and program practice as well. This season is more challenging because we have less ice time than we had before because of hockey games, other sports competitions, public skating, concerts, etc… Next to all this there’s our public-school system. Makes it even harder to coordinate evening practices. Half of our skaters go to school in the morning where the other half has to go in the afternoon/evening. This changes weekly, so we schedule for late evening practices to accommo- date everyone. There’s also the fact that we don’t have proper facilities to do our off ice ballet/choreography/fit- ness practice, so we improvise on that a lot. As coaches, we train our skaters in all these different aspects of syn- chro skating, as our country does not have ice dancers or pair skaters, so unfortunately, we don’t have all these different types of coaches to work with and are not able to tap into their expertise. Maybe even more challenging is getting enough ice time during summer for camps. That sounds like a struggle? I could talk for hours on stuff that could be better regarding our facilities, but this is what we have and we all try in a positive manner to do the best we can with what we have. In the end, we can all proudly say that we developed our own skaters, from synchro school, all the way up to senior. I suppose you do have ideas and goals? Of course, I am a believer, but my goals and dreams are realistic, still very challenging though! Despite we’re not in the top 10 coun- tries, we still exist and compete every season and try to improve our own development. Synchronized skating as a sport and as a skating discipline has progressed really quickly over the past few years and it’s more challenging Miljkovic Ozana