Transfer

Peter has left his old club and transferred to another one.

This simple sentence above is the result of several nights' bad sleep, a lot of brain cells damaged and weeks spent in anxiety. All of which could have been avoided of course.

Why?
Well that is the question that is still bugging us almost every minute these days. It is one month now that we've made the decision but still it echoes in our mind. I did not want to write about it earlier, letting time to settle things and look back from a distance, but it is still hard to put it down correctly.
If I try to look back from a distance, it all started last October when coach TT was contracted. His main job was to deal with the kids in the club who wanted to race short-track. Coach E told us he had other things in life that took his time and he would be teaching the small ones, who started out discovering skating. This setup seemed fine for us and we knew coach TT was in the national short-track team until recently, so we expected up-to-date knowledge that he could transfer to our kids.
And he did so. He sketched plans and after the initial training sessions told us that our kids lack a lot technically so he could only promise to make them really competitive for the Junior Nat. Champs late in the season, in February. We've accepted this and he began working with them very hard.

And when I say very hard I mean this for real. There have been trainings when the kids almost threw up, when I had to take Peter up the stairs home on my back, when he almost fell asleep on the drive home that is about 10 minutes, etc. According to Churchill: 'blood, sweat and tears'. Okay, blood was not too common :)
After about 2 weeks the first cracks opened. Those (few) who couldn't stand the idea of hard work declared they did not want to race short-track and wanted to do inline only. So they went back to coach E and began some 'base building' period which, to tell the truth, wasn't hard at all. And from then on coach E became more and more jealous(?) about coach TT, it seemed. And of course dirty materials were involved, too, as the club leaders began to complain about coach TT's salary - that was quite strange as it was them who've contracted him...
Months passed, work was on and results started to come. In the championships those who worked hard for real under coach TT posted wonderful times, scoring PBs in all distances. Once again the old wisdom proved true, hard work yielded good results. But then there was another race still in the calendar, late March that we've planned to visit. But all of a sudden the club leaders decided they would not pay for the ice in March. We were shocked - how do we race then if we cannot train on ice?

We swallowed the bitter pill though but our kids were in some kind of 'punishment'(?) - they had to share the training hall with the absolute beginners, but coach TT tried to work it out so they did a lot of dryland and some tech drills. By the end of March it became clear this was not leading anywhere.
And then we suffered a big slap in the face. Coach E posted the groups' timetable for the trainings and coach TT's group had no time reserved for the trainings in the local skate track. We parents decided to meet the club leaders and question their decision, when they told us that they've fired coach TT and his group will be trained again by coach E. Bit strange that coach TT did not know he was being fired...

We were shocked. Really shocked. This all happened on a Friday eve and you can imagine what our weekend was like. We've seen coach E train Peter for years however he has developed in the last 6 months more than ever under the direction of coach TT, so we were sure that returning to coach E was a no-go. Just exactly that time I've read Susan Ellis' article about coaches telling 'do 10 laps of this or that' vs coaches teaching the correct position and technique above all. Coach E is of the former, coach TT is of the latter type for sure.
We talked a lot. We phoned a lot, then talked a lot again. One thing was clear. We wanted to leave the club that didn't even consider what was good for our kids, just their own personal greedy ambitions (maths is simple: ice is expensive, renting a gym is not). After 4 years they just threw away our kids, several champions, hard working ones.

There were 3 clubs in Szeged: one for short-track only, one for inline only, and the one we were to leave, doing both. The obvious would have been to transfer to the first. But after several days' thinking and asking Peter, too, we decided to stay with coach TT. He decided to start a new club and so we joined it.
There are only 5 kids in the club now, but I hope it will grow soon. What are they doing these days? They train 5 times a week, 4* inline and 1 time dryland, as there is no permanent ice available. Sometime during the summer we plan a training camp to gain some ice time, then in October it will be available here, too. If we can find free slots in the ice schedule... Generally speaking we are looking forward racing short-track, but we may visit some inline races, too - just to keep racing spirits high.

So you won't see Peter in black/orange in the future. I think the skinsuit will be green/black/silver. With a silver lining.