Glen Hanlon accepted a coaching opportunity loadedwith challenges and excitement when he signed as the national team coach of Slovakia. With just 56 days left before the first puck drop at the World Championship on home ice in Bratislava, Hanlon talks about the preparations.
After three World Championships with Belarus and the 2010 Worlds with Slovakia, Glen Hanlon is preparing the Slovak national team for one of the most important events in recent history when Slovakia will host the 2011 IIHF World Championship in Bratislava and Kosice for the first time as an independent nation.
The former NHL goalkeeper and Washington Capitals coach was named national team coach after Slovakia’s surprising fourth-place finish at the Vancouver Olympics.
The American-Canadian dual citizen accepted the challenge to make the team more competitive after it missed the World Championship quarterfinals for the third straight year.
IIHF.com sat together with Hanlon after the team won the Slovakia Cup in Bratislava against Switzerland.
You had your first events with the Slovak national team in a season that ends with the World Championship on home ice. What are your conclusions after the first tournaments?
While the other coaches were looking for young players, we have to think which older players we want to keep, as a generation change is coming. I want to give every player, who has played some games for the national team in the last few years, a fair chance.
There are some players I hadn’t seen before, who played for the national team three or four years ago. In our first event in Munich we had a couple of young players, like defencemen (Michal) Sersen and (Peter) Mikus, and I was really happy with them and also with the young goaltenders, (Julius) Hudacek and (Branislav) Konrad.
We have (Jaroslav) Halak and (Peter) Budaj, who are world-class goalies in the NHL, but there’s a chance that they won’t be able to come. We have (Jan) Lasak and (Rastislav) Stana and the young goalies, and they give us 100 percent confidence for the years to come. This kind of competition and environment brings the best out of these young players and I hope it gives them confidence.
How important was it for your team to win the first tournament at the new arena in Bratislava?
Every time we put together a Slovak national team we want to win hockey games. As a team it’s fun to win. The team showed lot of character and it’s good for our chemistry. But it’s even more important for the excitement of the fans, for the media, for the guys building the arena and for all the people of the Slovak Ice Hockey Association that we won the Slovakia Cup before hosting the World Championship.
What do you think of the arena?
I really like the arena. It’s not only great for the fans, but also for the players. The dressing rooms here are better than at any World Championship I’ve been. The facilities are great.
Were you surprised that the established players from the KHL didn’t play so well in the November event in Munich?
It was indeed the Extraliga players who scored the goals. Roman Tomanek had a great game. He reminds me of Oleg Antonenko in Belarus. There’s not a lot of right-handed shots in Europe and when you have somebody that’s really good with the puck and plays power play and is a right-handed shooter, it really helps the team. MarekHascak scored a great goal against Germany, the third in his fourth international game.
I’m sure all the KHL players want to score and they played well. I was very happy with Marcel Hossa, who also did the small things such as protecting the puck. He brings a level of intelligence into the game. If they don’t score in these games, it doesn’t mean they won’t in the future.
Whatever we did wrong in these events, we cannot do it again in Bratislava.
How many of the players you used in the Slovakia Cup will make the World Championship rosters?
All depends on the NHL players. If the NHL players are out of the playoffs, they can join our team. We also have some players in the AHL we can contact after the playoffs. But looking at the players that were here, they played very well and that makes the selection process difficult for the coaching staff.
How did it feel to be behind the bench of your brand-new home arena for the first time?
I was thinking about being here in two months with the excitement of the World Championship and the atmosphere in this arena.
The people in Slovakia presented me with a wonderful opportunity. We work hard to bring success and we’re looking forward to lots of excitement with the start of the World Championship. But we still have another month and a half of preparation.
How has it been for you to live in Bratislava?
I’ve been in Bratislava since last March, but went back to North America during the summer. I love living in Bratislava. It’s a nice city and I have everything I need. The association and the people I work with treat me very well. It’s a great working environment and with the World Championship coming up there’s no better place and opportunity to be than in Bratislava.
Do you feel extraordinary pressure coaching the host nation of the next World Championship?
I feel the excitement. It’s just so exciting. I’m sure if you spoke to Uwe (Krupp) last year, he confirmed it’s an opportunity that no coach in the world wouldn’t want, to be able to take a team in their own country. Obviously, when you coach at the World Championship in a year with more NHL participation, you’re hoping you’re going into the battle with as many of your country’s best players, so we have to see how it plays out in the NHL.
Have you set an official goal for the World Championship?
We’re not really ready to be worried about that right now. We have so much work to do in preparation and things we need to do before getting too concerned about winning something. There’s a process we need to work on and then we start setting our goals.
What do you and your team need to do in order to improve from 2010?
We want to make sure in the preparation that our systems are just perfect, that we don’t make any mistakes. In each tournament like the ones in Germany, Switzerland and Slovakia, it comes down to power play and penalty kill, it comes down to good discipline, not taking bad penalties, and it comes down to making sure that your systems are just perfect because they’re all world-class players and if you give them the opportunity, they’re going to score. That’s our focus. To be perfect without the puck.
That’s my goal right now. And then once we get there we can talk about goals. We must be successful as coaches – which I know we will be. As a group, when we become 100 percent sure that we play the proper way no matter what the situation is, then we can start talking about if we’re ready to win a medal.
The team used to have Slovak or Czech coaches. Do you feel it’s a big change for the players to have a North American coach now?
That’s a great question. The biggest thing I try to tell people is that in North America they used to get criticized because they always judged the players by country. The world of hockey now has become small. Now in the NHL or a national league, they don’t look whether you’re Finnish, Swedish, Russian or Slovak.
I look whether you’re a good offensive player, a good defensive player, a physical player, a smart player, no matter what country you are. To get to my point: I go in there and I communicate in English, also through the phone or the internet, and all these players speak English, some of them better than others.
This will be about my sixth World Championship and I coached in Finland for a year and I coached in Minsk for half a year, it’s not my first year in European hockey. I have a decent awareness of the space of the rink, the style of play, the level, the tolerance of penalties and all the things that go on with it.
The most important thing is you really have to embrace the players’ culture, the food and do what you can to try to learn the language, as difficult as it is. Talk in terms of “we” in the country, and of “our” excitement, be part of the family. I have a contract with the goal to go right through the Olympics in 2014. I’m not coming here to leave.
Do you sense a difference from the players’ sidedue to the fact that the World Championship is played in Bratislava?
If I remember how I was as a player, their focus right now is all with their (club) teams, especially the guys in the NHL. There’s so much focus on trying to make the playoffs and trying to play well individually. I don’t think there’s much of a focus on them on Bratislava right now.
But I think for players that play in Europe there’s a lot of talk about the World Championship. It’s more the organizer, the people on the staff, the coaching staff, the day-to-day operations running the World Championship and the national team that show plenty of excitement already now.
Is it a concern for you that in the international breaks you always play the same teams such as Belarus, Germany and Switzerland, while the Czechs, Finland, Russia and Sweden do their own thing with the Euro Hockey Tour?
Right now we seem to have enough competition with Switzerland and Germany, so I’m not too concerned. I understand the economics and how things work with the Euro Hockey Tour. But in March and April in the next two years there will be some sort of interaction between them and the other countries.
We play Sweden and Finland next spring, which I think is good. I know as a coach that I love coming to Germany and I love going to Switzerland, and I would be disappointed if this wouldn’t be part of our schedule. Their teams are so good, and so well coached. To me it has become kind of a rivalry.
MARTIN MERK
