Part 2 of a series on young coaches. Read part 1 at the link.
by Jacquelyn Thayer
Growing up a coach’s son, I definitely gained some insight into the job from my dad. I think my first memory is just how much traveling is involved when you have your own program—competitions, seminars, etc. My dad was on the road a lot. The other aspect of the job I was exposed to is how much work is required off the ice—usually on the phone or sitting in front of a computer—to ensure your students are organized, well-directed, and ready for whatever point in the season may be forthcoming. Of course, this is all work coaches are not compensated for, so I learned quickly that the job takes a great amount of commitment.
– Mitch Islam
Competitive skaters who hope to continue in the sport professionally beyond retirement typically have two available career paths: coaching or show performance, whether with a popular touring production or via a long-term cruise ship contract. A handful may do both, focusing on coaching as a day job while taking advantage of opportunities with seasonal productions like Stars on Ice or any of the spectacles offered in skating-friendly countries like Japan and Russia. Given the decline of show skating in North America—and the demand for high-caliber expertise—coaching is the safer route. But it’s also a gig for which many skaters have trained from an early age, with most tackling such work to help fund their own training.
American ice dance team Anastasia Cannuscio and Colin McManus, who retired from competition in 2017, were national junior medalists, top five finishers at the 2015 and 2016 U.S. Championships, and five-time international medalists. They’ve also logged years behind the boards, beginning their coaching careers as teens while training at the University of Delaware. Like many, they cut their teeth as Learn to Skate coaches before later acquiring private students. “I was coaching probably about 35 to 40 hours a week on top of the training that we were doing, because it just made the most sense as a way for us to make money and, you know, not have that much of a commute,” said McManus.
Cannuscio and McManus were also their own first choreography clients, participating heavily in the process during their final few years of competing. “It was very much a partnership with me and Stasia and our coach of creating those programs,” said McManus. “And then the word got out that we had done choreography for ourselves, and there were people that were interested in having us get in and do choreography for other teams.”
It was Cannuscio who explicitly cited the coaching versus show calculus. “We had already built our client base, so it didn’t really make sense for us, when we got done skating, to dive into that, because then you’re away from clients, the base that you’ve grown and the business that you’ve grown, and then you just leave it behind?” she said. “But I was always planning on continuing on that path.”
McManus agreed. “I think I’ve always had the idea of being a coach for a very long time, since I was young, and I think the idea of what kind of coach I wanted to be has changed a lot over the years,” he said.
Mitch Islam, who with partner Alexandra Paul earned three Canadian senior dance medals, 2010’s junior national title and world junior silver, and a trip to the 2014 Olympics, also entered the coaching ranks while himself a junior. Initially partnering skaters through dance tests, he branched out into work at assorted clubs near his then-training base of Barrie, Ontario. “I started working stroking, started doing some choreography, and things just kind of developed from there,” he said.
But unlike Cannuscio and McManus, Islam was once loath to consider coaching a top-of-mind career goal—thanks ironically in part to his family’s roots in the sport, with his father Mariposa School of Skating dance director and coach David Islam and his mother international judge and former Canadian national medalist Deborah Islam. “I think that coaching chose me, to be honest. I was reluctant to, I guess, admit that it was something that could be in my future,” he said. “My dad has always said to me, you know, go to school, learn something new, and see if you can make a career out of it. He loves his job, he loves what he does, but being a figure skating coach is hard work. There are long hours and you’re putting your heart and soul into the journey of somebody else, and it’s a grind. And I think that’s a little bit of where that came from, just his sort of direction for me growing up.”
After retiring from competition in December 2016, however, Islam and Paul began pitching in with Mariposa’s younger couples. “I knew right away that I was passionate about it and it doesn’t feel like work to me,” he continued. “It’s what I love to do. I love to be on the ice, I love to help people, and so honestly, it’s been a no-brainer.”
But Paul’s long-term professional interests lay outside the rink. She recently completed law school at the University of Windsor, with plans to work in the field. She has, however, contributed to her on- and off-ice partner’s coaching work; not only did the two collaborate on choreography in 2017 and 2018, but she’s also provided on-ice consultation to his students, with former Mariposa seniors Rubie Diemer and Petr Paleev having occasional weekend sessions with Paul in Windsor last season. “So maybe a little bit more specific to what Rubie needs to be doing or what Alex can share, what her thought process was on this particular part of the dance, what I might think about doing here to make this the best it could be,” said Islam.
“Obviously I would love if she was coaching with me, but she knows what she wants to be doing and I’m very supportive of that,” he continued. “Next year, she’ll be around Barrie all the time and we’ll probably get her out a little bit more frequently. So yeah, we feel fortunate that we still have access to her and we can send our kids to her for just a fresh point of view.”
Cannuscio and McManus, meanwhile, have largely shifted their skating partnership from one side of the boards to the other—with little changing. “When we were skating together, we had different strengths and weaknesses,” said Cannuscio. “We learned differently, and Colin is always really good at finding music; I’m not so good at that. So I leave that up to him when it comes to our kids that we share.”
The partnering history itself confers a particular advantage. “Especially when it comes to choreography, since we did have such a handle in the choreography we did for the last few seasons that we competed, it’s just super natural for us to just listen to the music and skate through it and figure out what we want to do, and then we just teach it to our students,” she continued.
“And then we look back at our students that are staring—’Did you get that?’ But it’s actually eerily similar from how we competed together to how we coach together,” added McManus. “I could say that I take on a little bit more of the creative role because I search for the music, but Stasia’s definitely the technician, because I just breeze past it. She’s like, it’s wrong, and I’m like, I don’t care, we’re going to keep moving. I think we find our own balances, but there are definitely moments where I’ll go back and say something technical, and then she’ll be like, but I was just trying to create something. When you’ve worked together and skated together for 11 years, we kind of have that unspoken way of communicating with each other that we just naturally round each other out.”
Not all partnerships, though, are confined to the on-ice dynamic. With Eric Radford, Meagan Duhamel holds the 2015 and 2016 world pair titles, 2018 individual Olympic bronze, and seven Canadian championships. But when she segued into a coaching career after the team’s retirement in 2018, it was with coach—and husband—Bruno Marcotte that she joined forces. Last year, the duo established their own pairs school in Oakville, Ontario, and already host students across a range of levels and nationalities.
“For Bruno and I, not much has changed,” she said. “We know each other and we can work well together. Some teams and skaters we coach together, and some he is coaching himself, or with other people. I hope one day the coaching team of Meagan and Bruno can be even half as successful as Marie-France [Dubreuil] and Patrice [Lauzon]!”
Of course, those dancers and pairs carrying a partnership through to a coaching career are rare, and most will fly solo. Asher Hill was the 2008 Canadian junior ice dance champion and a 2012 Worlds competitor with partner Kharis Ralph, later picking up 2015 Autumn Classic gold with Nicole Orford before retiring after the 2015-16 season. He dates his earliest coaching experience to days as a program assistant with CanSkate, Canada’s learn to skate program, though he moved into the work more seriously around 2013-14—also tackling his first major choreography assignment in 2014 with a free dance for juniors Mackenzie Bent and Garrett Mackeen.
Utilizing both his extensive dance background as well as years of experience competing singles, Hill coaches and choreographs at Ontario’s Brampton Hill Skating Academy along with clubs in Thornhill and Milton, focusing especially on skating skills and development at the first two and polish at the latter. “So I’m there to clean up the programs, add more body movement—just really enhance getting deeper into it, like adding facial expression, really trying to explore what the program is for the skater and how to make it better and develop it more throughout the season,” he said.
But while these coaches bring advanced experience in their own disciplines, as teachers, they currently work in far broader strokes. Cannuscio and McManus have a particularly diverse student body, ranging from four and five-year-olds in Learn to Skate to intermediate and senior dance couples, as well as adult and synchro students. “We have every type of age and discipline and student that we could—except for pairs. I think that’s the only thing we don’t really have,” said McManus, who has also choreographed for 2020 U.S. Championships competitors like Joseph Kang and Mia Eckels.
“We stay really well balanced and well rounded, because skating’s for everyone, you know,” said McManus. “Just because we competed at a high, elite level, it gives us a different perspective, but it doesn’t mean that we have to coach at that level at all. We’re just as happy teaching basic skills as we are teaching our dance teams.”
“Yeah, sometimes it’s more fun,” added Cannuscio with a laugh.
While Islam first sought to cast a wide net in work with area clubs, a promotion last year to the full-time staff at Mariposa has meant he now concentrates most of his energies on that school’s dance and singles programs. He has, however, dedicated one day a week to work at Oakville, consulting with Marcotte and Duhamel’s pairs—a valuable learning experience, he noted, given his limited opportunity to work with pairs otherwise. The arrangement began more informally in the 2018-19 season through occasional work with friends Kirsten Moore-Towers and Michael Marinaro, then based in Montreal, and has grown from there.
“When they moved to Oakville, one of the things for them was making sure they had their team in place and felt like they were going to be taken care of,” he said. “So they reached out to me and that’s something that was kind of a no-brainer for me—good opportunity professionally, I really enjoyed work with them, and that sort of spawned into a great situation with all of Bruno and Meagan’s teams there.”
Though coaching focuses may vary, one thing many have learned in this transition is just how short a memory the sport can really have. Among his young students and client base, Hill may be known less for his on-ice achievements than for those on-camera—his new CBC series with retired pair champion Dylan Moscovitch, “That Figure Skating Show.”
“So now they’re watching that and they’re asking me about all these different questions,” said Hill with a laugh. “So they have no idea that I was a skater that went to Worlds, but they do know I’m on YouTube.”
And given his focus on ice dance in the senior ranks, his freestyle students are often surprised to learn that he competed in singles through the junior level, only concluding his efforts in 2009.
“They have no idea. They’re just like, he was a skater? Oh, cool. Maybe I’ve heard of him, I don’t know,” he continued. “It’s humbling because although I’m definitely not the very most decorated ever in Canada at all by any means, they know all the big names and they’ll ask if you know them. Like, yeah I do, and then they don’t care about you anymore, they just want to know about those persons.”
Though many of Cannuscio and McManus’s current students were too young to recall the duo’s competitive career firsthand, they’ve learned about their coaches through other means.
“Ours is a YouTube skating generation,” said McManus ruefully. “Everything we’ve done is out there, for better or worse.”
“Like my one skater one day—‘I saw you on YouTube but you had blonde hair!’” added Cannuscio.
“I’ve had some students that came to watch us at like a Nationals one year and we were on a poster or something, and people were asking us for autographs and whatever, and then my students were like, no, that’s just my coach. Like, why do you want his autograph?” said McManus. “It goes both ways. But they have an idea of what we’ve done. We’ve kind of built our name with University of Delaware where we coach now, so I think they kind of go hand in hand. We have a banner, which is nice.”
“It’s kind of a testament to how life works,” said Islam. “Even myself and some of the kids that I’m able to work with nowadays, they have no concept of my career and all that kind of stuff. It’s a fast turnover and the sport keeps moving, doesn’t it? So things are, I guess you could say, left behind pretty quickly.”