Tangent - nice work if you can get it

This is about the post below, in which we read about the lonely pluckiness of Jessica Dube as she trained alone without Bryce in 2010.

The article must have thrilled Dube Davison fans. It reported how Dube Davison talked every day, that Jessica felt lost without Bryce and still relied upon his support and advice, and it described Bryce not only showing up for her regional Challenge competition (with his family), but visiting Montreal to watch her practice. And not a mention of Scott Moir!

As an example of the double dealing that went on continually with the Dube Moir hoax put over on the public, this shines.

But the tangent part is reading quotes from Annie Barabe'. Such as this:

“In pairs, they were only doing the Axel and Salchow, just doing those jumps every day, and sometimes if it doesn’t go well, you just keep practising your mistakes in the jumps,” Barabe said. “When there’s more to practise, sometimes you have less problems.* Now she’s way, way more consistent in her jumping.”

What is she, a coach - or a spectator? There are skating parents with more of a clue.

If your skaters are practicing their mistakes, the coach is supposed to deconstruct the mechanics of the mistake and re-set the technique so it's proper. That's the job. I recall Bryce verbally deconstructing Jessica's salchow problem as her tending to get back on her heel. He said it was a matter of adjusting the mechanics, because other than that the technique was basically solid. He could and did deconstruct his own issues too - understand them, and work to correct them (such as his hip opening up in his axel landing). I really think Bryce coached himself most of the time. He had to have.

If your skaters' practice day is so dull and predictable their mind wanders and they fuck up, maybe you should step up and challenge them.

In watching Jessica (at first to see the much-reported "misery with Bryce" - which was never actually visible and was a projection by fans, and then to see what her mechanics were like when she slipped up) - I noticed in competition after competition she did one of two things when there was a mistake - got back on her heel or fell off an outside edge. It got worse as seasons wore on. She got lazy about it.

At the time I thought "Good luck with getting her to adjust that one, Bryce" because even then it was pretty clear that when Jessica makes mistakes she tells herself and is told it's all because of her high expectations of herself.** It's a perfectionist, emotional thing - that's more flattering, and it's how she prefers it. It's not about tedious stuff such as re-organizing what you're doing physically.

Second, from the below it also appears that at Barabe's camp, the skaters do the same damn thing every single day. Again - WTF, she's a coach. It's not like that's some winning formula for her either. 

I think many observers of Dube/Davison, including Davison, were dying for Dube Davison to do something other than the same damn program every season the same way. Easiest money David Wilson made every year.

If Barabe's theory was if her skaters can do something in their sleep it makes it less likely they'll make mistakes, it was a stupid theory, because a sign of a Barabe skater is a head case who chokes and wobbles. The positive reinforcement absent a challenging coaching environment is going to give you damn good reason to choke. If a skater's not prepared, they're going to be nervous. Her skaters get maintenance training. "Maintaining" isn't going to support you when the stakes are high.

It also leads to mental sloth. For someone like Jessica, she often appeared as if she HAD fallen asleep out there on the ice and had plenty of mental room to mull over other things, such as 'why did I stumble just there - better pull up short on the throw landing coming up to make sure." "Hmm, everything seems okay in this jump but what if I fall? Better put a hand down." And in the non arial stuff she'd occasionally trip over her own feet just because it appeared she actually had catnapped between dismount and spiral sequence. And of course, with her mind so focused on self-protection, she wasn't focused enough on the here and now, so more mistakes. She hadn't trained in a challenging enough way to engage either her mind or body.

Basically it appears as if Jessica hasn't been coached to take responsibility out on the ice.

That's not good coaching. Good coaching - good choreography - is the short program that someone - Zoueva or Wilson or someone else (commentators never settled on the name) did for Dube/Wolfe last year. While, naturally, Jessica appeared to like the ponytail swinging part the most, overall the short was her more dynamic skate last season. The rhythms and transitions and connecting moves were new even if the actual elements were the same, so she actually had to invest herself in each non-element move to pull it off. She couldn't do it in her sleep. If your athlete can do it in their sleep, that's not a good thing. Things get sloppy.

Third - the flattering spin in this Jessica interview! Oh, now that she's free from the expectations of all the winning she always does with Bryce - all those Grand Prix golds, for instance - Jessica is just knocking out those triples - lutzes, flips, salchows.

Except she wasn't. She never had a triple toe really. I can't recall her landing a 3 loop. She could get a lutz airbourne, but underrotated/two footed the landing. She didn't have a flip because it got edge called. During her first season with Wolfe they had sbs flips which were then abandoned because she couldn't take off on an outside edge. It was back to salchow.

I don't get how that training center decided that keeping a skater static was the best way to ensure success. It seems more like a daycare situation than a coaching one.

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*Why didn't Barabe apply this insight to the layout of the programs? If a skater is skating the same program, same style, same layout, same everything, every year, it's going to get stale. Everything from the performance to the technique. Jessica got out of shape, and she got sloppy. Why didn't Barabe give her skaters "more to practise" outside of the jump area? Why is she such a fan of formula, of rote repetition of the dull?

**Later Jessica added more cover by throwing in "virus" "tendonitis" and now "ankle."