{"id":16796,"date":"2019-10-15T12:04:33","date_gmt":"2019-10-15T16:04:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/figureskatersonline.com\/news\/?p=16796"},"modified":"2019-10-31T22:08:52","modified_gmt":"2019-11-01T02:08:52","slug":"legendary-coach-frank-carroll-talks-skating-with-figure-skaters-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/figureskatersonline.com\/news\/2019\/10\/15\/legendary-coach-frank-carroll-talks-skating-with-figure-skaters-online\/","title":{"rendered":"Legendary coach Frank Carroll talks skating with Figure Skaters Online<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Maura Sullivan Hill, Team FSO staff writer
\nHeader photo from Carroll Private Archive<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The\u00a0Ice Theatre of New York<\/a>\u00a0is honoring renowned coach Frank Carroll with their annual Lifetime Achievement Award (Read our article about Ice Theatre of New York’s gala here<\/a><\/strong>).<\/em>\u00a0 Though Carroll has retired from coaching, the 81-year-old still place an active role in the sport, working with coaches and mentoring skaters. So while talking with Carroll about this upcoming recognition, Figure Skaters Online<\/em>‘s Maura Sullivan Hill talked with Carroll about the advice he gives other coaches, how he approached big competitions, his thoughts on his former student Gracie Gold’s comeback and why he never makes predictions in figure skating.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Figure Skaters Online (FSO):<\/strong> What do you think the future holds for 2019 U.S. Champion Alysa Liu, who you have been mentoring?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Frank Carroll:<\/strong> \u201cShe is a darling girl; she has a great personality. She is a kid; she runs around with the kids at the rink in Oakland and they play all these games and they\u2019re silly and they have fun. She may be the national senior ladies champion, but basically, she\u2019s a little girl. A very sweet, kind little girl. Until she gets on the ice, and then she becomes a tiger. I don\u2019t make any predictions and think that people who make predictions in skating don\u2019t know the way life in figure skating turns out. A lot of times, it\u2019s the people you think are down who come back, like\u00a0 what Gracie Gold is trying to do. And the people that are on top that think they are the hotsie totsies that fail. I just wish Alysa the best and I\u2019ll do whatever I can to help her. Her coach is very smart. Laura Lipetsky [a former Carroll student] knows what to do. She knows how to seek help, where to go, who are the best at what they do, who to listen to and who not to [listen to].\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n


\nFSO:\u00a0<\/strong><\/i><\/b>S<\/i>peaking of Gracie Gold<\/a>,\u00a0 what do you think of her comeback?<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

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Frank Carroll:<\/strong> \u201cWell, I think that if she does succeed, it will be wonderful for her. She went through a deeply emotional, disturbing time in her life and unfortunately, she was unable to share that with me.\u00a0 I knew there was something wrong, but these kids, when they have a problem, they don\u2019t open up about it, they keep it hidden. Sometimes they don\u2019t know what\u2019s wrong with themselves. Part of what we do in coaching skating is being basically a psychologist. I\u2019m very grateful for the courses I took at Holy Cross [where Carroll went to college in his hometown of Worcester, MA] that had to do with psychology, because I think that understanding behavior and interactions with other human beings was a very helpful thing for me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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FSO: <\/i><\/b>Not only do you mentor skaters, but you have also made a point of helping other coaches throughout your career, like Laura Lipetsky and Kori Ade. Why is that a priority for you?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>
Frank Carroll with Olympic Champion Evan Lysacek (Carroll Private Archive)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Frank Carroll:<\/strong> \u201cWell, first of all, a lot of them are terrified. It could be their first national champion, their first exposure to the politics and the deep, deep worry or nerves that go along with [it]. One of the most nervous things in the world is to have somebody who is world champion, or somebody who\u2019s a national senior champion, go back to Nationals or the worlds and standing there with them while they defend their title. This is a great deal more difficult than winning the title. When they win, they are all ambition and all freedom and, \u2018I\u2019m gonna win this, I\u2019m gonna for it,\u2019 not the fear of, \u2018Who am I? What\u2019s going to happen to me?\u2019 They [other coaches] ask how I got through different situations, how did I handle it? How did I handle parents? What did I do when every judge was making a suggestion that I change something or do something differently? How did I make my decisions? I\u2019m happy to share with them only my own experience, my own thoughts. It\u2019s not necessarily the way they should go, but they do value the fact that I would give them the time to tell them how I feel about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Number one, you gotta realize it\u2019s all about them [the skater]; it\u2019s not about you. This is their life, their career. You know, people will say to me, \u2018You made Michelle Kwan the most beautiful skater, the world champion!\u201d or \u2018You made Evan Lysacek the Olympic champion!\u201d That is not true. I was there to guide them and to help them. They made themselves the world champion and Olympic champion. They had the guts; they had the passion; they had the ability. I was just there to direct and give them emotional support and encourage them. And I always felt, in that moment when they\u2019re so under stress, I had to be very, very calm. And I had to be totally in control and just appear like I had no emotions whatsoever. Everything was just as it goes every day. Everything is calm, everything is great, you\u2019re going to do exactly the way you trained it. No ups and downs and all that. I might have been dying inside, but I learned never to show any kind of emotion at a competition\u2014just to appear to be totally in control.<\/span><\/p>\n


\nFSO: <\/i><\/b>You\u2019ve spoken at length about the influence your coach, Maribel Vinson Owen, had on you. What kind of impact do you think you had on your own students?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n


\nFrank Carroll:<\/strong> Maribel Vinson was one of the most generous, kind, authoritarian, knowledgeable, brilliant, magna cum laude graduates of Radcliffe College. She was very intimidating to me because I felt that her mind was quicker than mine. I\u2019ve never met anybody that I thought knew what I was thinking, not only what I was saying, but what was in the back of my head. Her whole philosophy of everything is what I\u2019ve taught over the years, about training, discipline, and taking responsibility for my life. That\u2019s the greatest lesson I ever learned from Maribel, was to take total responsibility for my life\u2014never to blame anybody, not for anything. Not the judges, not the ice, not my skates. What I did on the ice was what I did, and that was my responsibility and I think that\u2019s a great lesson that young people today have to learn, to stop blaming other people.<\/span><\/p>\n


\nThis interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.<\/i><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Though Carroll has retired from coaching, the 81-year-old still place an active role in the sport, helping coaches and skaters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/figureskatersonline.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/figureskatersonline.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/figureskatersonline.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/figureskatersonline.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/figureskatersonline.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16796"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/figureskatersonline.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16821,"href":"https:\/\/figureskatersonline.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16796\/revisions\/16821"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/figureskatersonline.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/figureskatersonline.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/figureskatersonline.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/figureskatersonline.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}