The big mission begins on Saturday and Zábranský knows that the ten-year wait for the medal is killing Czech hockey. “We are a hockey and football nation and we need success. Parents must see that it makes sense to take children to hockey,” says the man who resurrected the Brno Kometa in an interview with Sport.cz and as the owner and coach led her to the titles. “And we also want to please people in these difficult times.”
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Are you an optimist before the championship?
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I am optimistic by nature. Nor did anyone believe me 18 years ago to put the Comet on its feet and make it what it is. And if no one still trusts us, it’s the motivation to prove them wrong. When I see how our players respond well to smaller systemic things, how we pay attention to them thanks to a detailist like Kari, I have to be optimistic.
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You say that Czech hockey needs success because of its children. Is this the key to recruitment?
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We were hit by the covid period, when children could not play sports, go to school. They learned through computers, which reinforced my impression that we urgently needed success to get the boys back on hockey. After all, such a product could not train for almost two years. We need to motivate parents, for whom it has also been a socially and economically challenging period, to bring the children back. The strongest recruits were after Nagano, the titles of world champions and in our Comet after our titles in 2017 and 2018. Medal success, and when the youth teams start to defeat Finland and Sweden regularly, can help a lot.
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After joining Kometa, you coached the children yourself, led a group around your son, which included Lukáš Dostál, Filip Král and later Martin Nečas. How to ignite a love of sports in children?
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For the second or third grade, a skating game exercise should be devised. At the same time fun for kids to look forward to training. From the fifth grade onwards, you pay attention to the results, not in the matches, but as the player improves in skating, you have to pay attention to his development. If a child brings you four from school, you won’t tell him: It doesn’t matter, mainly play there! And we may have inadvertently chosen this way to “come and play.” We don’t have the results, so we made a mistake with the set system about 14 years ago, you can never work without mistakes, but it was a bad decision. Many of them are about the approach of the parents and then the coach, who has to take the child as a teacher.
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But there are not many good coaches, they often come across ambitious parents.
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Hockey as a team sport is also about how a child behaves in the team, how he behaves in it. And the importance of the coach is enormous. As a coach, I had the huge advantage that I set my parents not to talk to me in hockey. I said to the boys: Now you have come to the locker room and you are mine. When you go out, you’re parents again. At Kometa, we had to teach the children to greet in the first place. They didn’t, but if you’re going to spend an hour and a half with your child, you have to be an educational hockey teacher. But what we can’t do is that when a child comes to the winter to teach him a somersault and a handstand.
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