With the first Monday in September a new series is starting on icehockey.hu in which those Hungarian clubs will be introduced that a youth system, this time its the Dunaújvárosi Acélbikák and icehockey.hu talked to Vladimir Babic, one of the youth coaches.
What should we know about you? In what areas of hockey do you work in and when did you move to Hungary?
I started to play hockey when I was six years in my home town of Tapolcsány. I didn’t really have any other options since there were 16 families in the apartment building that we lived in and there were 22 boys from which 20 of us played hockey, so since a young age all I lived for was hockey. Around the age of 16 I noticed that I might not have a future as a pro hockey player, that's when I decided to get into coaching, there were 52 of us fighting to make the U16 roster. At the gae of 18 I had my C-license and in 2006 along with Tamás Sille we got our B-license together. I moved to Dunaújváros in 2002.
Why exactly Dunaújváros?
Dunaújváros used to hold preseason training camps in Léva, that's where I got to know the management of the club. The coach of Dunaferr at that time was Vladimir Matejov who also happened to be from Tapolcyán, and through him is how I ended up in Dunaújváros. Aside from an 18 month spell in Zalaegerszeg I have been in Dundaújváros since then.
How does coaching and refereeing fit together?
There isn’t really a problem with completing both tasks, I only officiate senior games and they don’t interfere with youth games. I have some great people I work with so if I did have a situation where I can’t be at a practice I know I can trust Gábor Jávorics, Attila Kis, Dorka Palkó, Imre Peterdi or Hunor Strenk to take care of everything.
Where do you see the Dunaújváros youth system compared to when you first arrived, and what kind of future do you see. What is the greatest advantage and what potential does it have?
I would split this into two parts, from 2002 to 2009 Dunaújváros won every age group, after that I went to Zalaegerszeg and I came back in 2011. Thi swas when the Dunaújváros youth system was in trouble a number of great players left the club. At this time i started working with the mini and supermini age groups. The goal was to have a good team in each age group in 5-6 years, right now we are going forward on the correct path. This year U16 is the only age group we don’t have a team in. I would like to mention that we are in a tough situation, we can’t really compete against the academies. The days have passed when everyone wanted to play for Dunaújváros, now it's the opposite everyone is leaving, last season 17 players from Dunaújváros won championships, all with different clubs. This is a bad rule, that players can just leave, in Sweden and Finland a player can not transfer until they are 16. Last season the best situation for us could have been entering a team together with Szeged but he had six guys leave to Fehérvár and one to MAC. If this continues Dunaújváros will become just a feeder system.