Evgenia Medvedeva: “Everyone wants results – children, parents, and coaches. But many people forget to praise the kids. You need to show children what they’re doing well.”
Evgenia Medvedeva talks about working with children on the ice.
original source: Katok
Evgenia Medvedeva emphasizes the importance of praising children in figure skating, sharing her own experiences both as a coach and a student. Here’s a translation of his comments.
“For quite a long time now, I’ve been helping out on the ice with children aged 10 to 15. Everyone wants results – children, parents, and coaches. But many people forget to praise the kids. Just to praise them. Sometimes a child does something well, sometimes not so well. Where it’s not so good, you need to give advice, but where it’s good, you absolutely must praise them.
I notice their reactions. For example, a child goes for a loop jump, and I see it’s not great, something feels awkward. I understand that, as an athlete, it was important for me to hear, ‘You did well here, and here we’ll fix things.’ If you fall – we’ll figure it out. You’re going to fall, that’s inevitable. But let’s try it this way, and let’s try it that way.
And I see the child gaining confidence. I say, ‘Let’s pick up a bit more speed.’ She picks up speed but falls on the jump because she launched at an angle. It’s important to say, ‘You did well here, you picked up speed, let’s keep that, but now we’ll fix the angle because your body was here…’ And she goes and does it.
You need to show children what they’re doing well. Why do kids stop wanting to do figure skating? They just don’t feel whether they’re doing well or not. ‘They always tell me I’m doing something wrong, and when I land a jump, nobody praises me. So I can’t tell if I did it well or not.’
I felt this myself when I started acting classes. It’s a tough subject – I’m preparing for a film shoot. My teacher comes, we turn on the camera, do exercises, and I keep getting corrected: ‘You did this wrong, this is not right, and this is not right.’ At some point, I just start crying.
They ask me why I’m crying. I answer, ‘I don’t understand. I’m not an actress at all, nothing is working out for me.’ They ask, ‘Why do you think that?’ Well, you’ve never once told me I acted well, you only tell me what I did badly. Please tell me what I did well and what I did badly, so I can separate the good from the bad.
And when she started praising me for the moments I did well, I started wanting to continue,” Medvedeva said on the show “Katok.”
Related topics: Evgenia Medvedeva
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