Marina Ulyankina has coached many Russian national team athletes, among them Maria Paseka, Seda Tutkhalian, Alla Sosnitskaya and Uliana Perebinosova. In a recent interview with Gymnastika magazine, she talked about her coaching philosophy and her goals.
“I’ve started a new cycle now, I have a lot of very talented little kids born in 2009, 2010 and 2011. Now I’ll be working with them for three-four years, so that they can show the best they can do in the next Olympic quad. Masha Paseka doesn’t need me as much as before. She has her vaults. Bars – yes, I need to help her there. If we add new elements and connections, she will be competitive on this event. But we made a deal – as soon as she will really need me, I’ll join her at Round Lake. And for now, I’ll be raising the new generation.”
“At what point did I realise that coaching is my calling? I guess, when I got into the wrong university. I entered the Krasnoyarsk Non-Ferrous Metals Institute. I was studying engineering but my soul was in the gym. That was also thanks to my coach, Valentin Adolfovich Shevchuk. He was a Teacher with a capital T. He taught us a lot, he made us fall in love with gymnastics. Somehow, it all progressed naturally: I tried coaching and like it. Back then, no one was chasing big money, no one needed large salaries. I studied at the institute in the morning and in the evening, I came to work at the gym. And I worked really hard. But other coaches kept taking the kids from me. It happened one year, then the next year. When it happened the third year in a row, I started getting upset – why? I can work, too! And then, when someone got sick or something, they put me coaching the group in which one girl was already on the national team. And somehow I got responsible for that whole group. But I was happy, I dived into the work and loved everything about it. At some point, Shevchuk told me: “Perhaps, you should go to Round Lake and study there”. But, of course, that was a scary proposal for me at the time. I wasn’t a career woman, I’ve always chosen my own path and earned everything thanks to my hard work. And I’m very thankful to Elvira Saadi who persuaded me to move to Moscow and to Misha Voronina who saw something in me and hired me to work at his club. He said: “You’ve got this”.
“I don’t have an Olympic champion [among my gymnasts], but all the girls have a good life. All are happy, all are satisfied, all are still calling me regularly. They all invite me to their weddings and want me to take part in their life even after they retire and when they have kids. I’ve just sent gifts for Robert, Katya Kurbatova’s baby son. I love each of my gymnasts in their own way just because all of them are different people. And I don’t care if she’s a World Champion or a 1st class gymnast, I’m genuine with each of them and my girls know and feel that.”
“Never rush to give up on a kid, at any age. I think that the earlier a kid starts at least playing in the gym, the better, because even just by playing on her own, she’s developing anyway. She starts, as we say, learning coordination, climbing onto the equipment, jumping, getting used to the gym. And when the girl is five years old, as a coach you can already start forcing her to at least straighten her knees and point her toes. She’s already coachable. But even if she comes to the gym later – that’s fine, too, it shouldn’t stop the coach. For example, Violetta Malikova came to me late, when she was almost in the first grade. I wasn’t even taking new kids because the group was full. But her dad really asked me. I remember that when she entered the gym, I asked her: “Jump up!” She jumped and I said right away: “I’ll take her!” I didn’t need to see anything else – three of our four events are leg events. Or how did it happen with Paseka? This kid has a very interesting path: she quit gymnastics already and started tumbling because she was kind left alone. Her coach went to work in America and the kids scattered away. It’s good that her mom called me after all, this girl has such a great jumping ability!”
“I’m explosive. Sometimes, I lose it, get fired up and raise my voice… Also, I grew up in Siberia and there people are very open – they say what they think. You can’t change me already but my pupils aren’t at fault either. If I yell at them in the heat of the moment, I always find it in me to apologise to the kid. And I never end the practice on a negative note, only on a positive one, that’s the law.”
“It’s not true that in our sport, there are fewer and fewer good kids. I have great kids now. I hope that you’ll see them on the competition floor. There’s not from wealthy families, but that’s almost always the case for me, non of my gymnasts were raised eating black caviar. However, afterwards they support their families and raise their social status thanks to their work. It’s a pity we don’t have foundations supporting talented gymnasts. We need to create such foundations because it would be great not just to coach these talented kids, but also to take them on vacation, to make them happy in other ways, to invest in them like we invest in our own children when we can. Not many people want to work, there aren’t enough coaches – that’s the problem and not a lack of gifted children. And people don’t want to work because there are no salaries. Thankfully, the national federation is helping us now, it’s very important for a coach to have support. But, on the other hand, I keep saying: “Guys, let’s say you get bigger salaries, will you start working better thanks to it?” The real coach is someone who can get down on their knees and raise new champions in a short time. I can gymnasts from the first class to the elite in three years. And I’m doing it. When your beautiful gymnast stands on the medal podium – it’s happiness. But even if you work at the national team level, you still need to dive into children’s gymnastics as before. However many years you work, you still crawl on your knees [with the little kids]. You get a group of five-year-olds, they are crawling on the mats and you’re crawling with them. They start rising slowly and you rise with them. While your knees still work, you need to get down often…”
“Recently, I saw an anniversary TV show about Nikolay Tsiskaridze. I think it was a great show. There was a moment when the journalist asked Tsiskaridze about his studies in the ballet school: “How were you raised?” “With carrot and stick”, her responds. “And what was your carrot?” “The stick”. And then he thanked his teachers for working with him in this way. because if no one paid attention to you, it meant that no one cared about you. It’s the same in sports.”
“Coaching is an interesting job, and a hard one, too. But those who want to work will work. It’s like the song: “They put us down – the pain makes us fly higher, and we spread our wings above our own roof. They put us down – we fly, laugh, and cry, leaving our misfortunes behind.” You start falling in love with this job and it’s true: the pain makes you rise higher and you keep trying to prove that you’re in the right place.”
“What’s the hardest part of the job? To learn how to separate between the carrot and the stick. It’s very important. Many don’t understand it, don’t feel where the border is. They think that if you will raise a child with strictness, she’ll learn faster. That’s not true. Of course, you can’t allow the pupils to push you around all the time. But when they grow up, the constant pressure is not needed either. In gymnastics, like in any other sport, you have to have both the carrot and the stick. But the carrot is often under appreciated. And if you don’t have the carrot, then no one ever will be able to deal with the girl who you have to force to work. It’s incredibly hard work, after all. To get up in the morning and to train for 8 hours a day without a carrot – that’s impossible. So what if the training isn’t going well, it happens. or the kid just got tired. Perhaps, it’s better not to insist on the repetitions and just give her that carrot, say: “Go, take a walk!” Let her rest, perhaps, she’ll forget about gymnastics. But then she’ll come back on her own and will understand that she’s the one who needs it, and not the country, the coach, or the club.”
“You’re saying that vault is my forte? Well, my girls performed pretty well on bars, too. No two girls had the same routine. I managed to construct a routine for Seda Tutkhalian based on one element. But vault, yes, on our national team, only my kids have done difficult vaults – Sosnitskaya, Paseka… The first one who won an individual medal at the European Championships was Masha Novikova. Then Katya Kurbatova became a two-time European champion on that event. Now Masha Paseka is a two-time World champion. I really hope that now, after such a difficult surgery, we’ll be able to do everything we planned. In order to do a very difficult vault, you kneed to know the technique. And, of course, the legs of a gymnast play a role, too. I think that even girls with average abilities are capable of doing a DTY. You just need to know how. Vault is a difficult event not because it’s difficult to do but because gymnasts get injured on it. Sometimes, it definitely adds psychological pressure. And how do I manage to teach them? I think that my engineering degree played a big part – it really pushed my brain and helped to prefect the technique of all these elements. No, I’m not singing praise to myself. I see and understand that major mistake, correcting which will also correct the five mistakes after that – that’s my secret. Believe me, in three years, I’ll have another group of good gymnasts.”
“What a coach should never do is to hang the medals too early – you’re a star, you’re the best… What our people like to do so much. As soon as you start raising your athletes like that, it’s as if God punishes them. They break. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, not everyone can handle it. I made such a mistake with one of my gymnasts. I believed so much that she was almost a champion and then she also started thinking about herself as a start. And what happened? She relaxed – well, if I’m a star, why do I need to work so hard? And she stopped working. So, here I can only repeat the words of Irina Viner: “You’re a start for exactly three seconds on the medal podium and when you get down – let’s start from scratch, baby.”
“I like working with a large crowd. First, when you have a group, it’s less likely that kids will get too full of themselves. There are such kids that want to have all the coach’s attention focused on them and do not want to share the spot with anyone else. You can’t give such conditions to anyone, you can’t treat little kids like stars. Gymnasts should always train in a group: if one’s in a bad mood and doesn’t want to work with the rest of the group, send her to condition or find her some other exercise and work with the other pupils.”
“Tokyo will be very hard for us. On one hand, four gymnasts on the team is too few for the all-around, but, at the same time, too many. But we have such a team, it can win a medal. The most important thing is not to make mistakes when choosing it, to form it right.”
“My biggest reason to be proud… I think I don’t have such a thing. I can, maybe, stay proud for three minutes, when my girls are on the medal podium. Other than that… I guess you can be proud of your children. Or your athletes, since you have a different story with each of them. And maybe I just haven’t had such a reason yet – we don’t have an Olympic gold yet. There are all the other medals, every single one of them, except this one. I’ll be waiting…”
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She should take over the Rodinenkos !