- Joined
- Feb 25, 2014
How long is the camp? I thought for some reason it was three weeks?
I guess having followed Jason’s odyssey before landing at TCC, it doesn’t seem odd to me. Jason skated a club a week in his tryouts, it seems also, he would train with Frank Carroll for weeks at a time before returning to Kori, and I don’t know how similar their methods were, although they obviously got along.
Shoma isn’t trying out “for” Eteri, as a young Russian skater who hopes to train there would. He’s training there to see if he likes it and how it suits him, so he can make a decision about where he thinks would best help him. He’s the one making the decision about whether he stays, and he needs information about what it’s like to train there to do it.
I would imagine that if Shoma went elsewhere, he would take those parts of anything that he learned and found helpful, and not use what he didn’t find helpful. I trust him to be smart enough to do that on his own.
I don't know how helpful it is to use Jason as a benchmark. There is the potential that this move is being encouraged/driven by JSF for one. USFS and JSF, and thus how coaching changes happen, are not always the same. And second, the technical level/needs between the two skaters are different.
Nothing I said implied that Shoma is trying out for Eteri. I would imagine both coaching team and skater are deciding if there is a good match. It's a mutual relationship.
And it's very easy to say that a skater can take good parts of what was learned at a summer camp and leave behind what wasn't useful, but we're also talking about human beings, who tense up at competitions and revert to bad habits, who have coaches who will ask for adjustments that may compromise what was previously learned, who may not be able to have the out-of-body perspective to know what's working while they're still in the thick of the competitive season and managing a lot of new variables in their day to day training after a coaching change. Medvedeva's 2A in competition versus practice is a prime example. In my opinion, it's not about being smart. I think there's a valid consideration about that loss of reinforcement when you're learning new techniques.