MINSK – The Belarusian Ice Hockey Association announced another change of the coaching position for the men’s national team. After Glen Hanlon and Mikhail Zakharov earlier this season, Eduard Zankovets will take over the team for the 2010 IIHF World Championship.
 
Zankovets has been an assistant coach of the national team for several years, a role he has also assumed with Russian club SKA St. Petersburg.
 
The executive committee of the association also named Andrei Gusov, Alexander Andrievsky and Vladimir Tsyplakov assistant coaches.
 
Zakharov, who coached the team in the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, will focus on his duties with Yunost Minsk and the Ukrainian national team that will play in the World Championship Division I later this month.
 
“In my eyes, we need to rely on Belarusian specialists in view of 2014,” president Evgeni Vorsin said. That year, Belarus hopes to take part in the Olympics in Sochi as well as hosting the 2014 IIHF World Championship in Minsk.
 
Zankovets, 40, hails from Minsk where he played for Dynamo Minsk in the Soviet league before stints in Russia, Denmark, Germany, Finland and the U.S. He represented Belarus as a forward in the 1998 and 2002 Olympic Winter Games.