A New Era For the Russian Women’s National Team

New Russian senior women’s national team head coach Yevgeni Bobariko. (Image Source)

The summer of 2019 is turning into a significant one for the Russian national hockey program. Already we have seen a new head coach appointed to the senior men’s national team, and now a change behind the bench has come to the senior women’s side as well. Gone after three seasons in charge is Alexei Chistyakov, and his replacement, promoted from the head-coaching job of the U18 and U16 women’s teams, is Yevgeni Bobariko. Read on, for some notes and thoughts…

Russian Hockey Federation President Vladislav Tretyak had some words on the coaching change:

“Yevgeni Bobariko showed very high-quality work with the women’s youth team. We see the great atmosphere in the team, which Yevgeni Viktorovich is constantly striving to create. We must also note the results of the team, which makes progress every year and shows a purposeful game… We expect progress from the coach and from our players.”

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And therein, I think, we can see why Chistyakov is out: there simply wasn’t enough progress, or enough results. His tenure in charge of the national team began with a disappointing fifth place finish at the Worlds in 2017, and the team followed that up by losing (narrowly) in the bronze-medal game at the 2018 Olympics and again in the third-place match at the 2019 Worlds.

On one hand, that’s far from disgraceful; but for a bit of luck here and there, a bronze medal or two might have come their way. There are other mitigating factors as well; the 5th-place result in 2017 was largely due to a remarkable performance by German goalie Jennifer Harß in the quarterfinal. The fourth-place finish at the Olympics in South Korea was actually the Russian women’s team’s best-ever result at the Games, and it came under very difficult circumstances due to the 2014 doping scandal that cost Chistyakov’s roster some good players and had them playing as a “neutral” team. His squads also showed well in competition against NWHL clubs, during what became a very interesting annual trip across the ocean (given the ongoing upheaval in North American professional women’s hockey at the moment, it is unclear if the Russian team will make that trip this fall). So there were some accomplishments during Chistyakov’s tenure, and he deserves some respect for that.

Alexei Chistyakov. (Image Source)

But the problem was that those good moments were too few, and most of all we must admit that the Russian women’s national squad has shown little to no sign over the past three seasons of really closing the gap on the two North American powerhouse national teams. Team Russia faced the U.S. and Canada twice each at the 2019 Worlds, and lost to the Americans by a combined score of 18-0 and to the Canadians by 12-1. Overall, at World Championships and Olympics Russia took on the North Americans nine times under Chistyakov, losing all nine games and by an average of about 6.5 goals each. As the Finnish women’s team has shown in the last couple of years, reeling in the North American countries is very doable, and Russia’s failure to make much if any headway in that regard will not have pleased the FHR.

There were other issues, too. Chistyakov went through a spell in about 2017 to 2018 when he seemed oddlyy reluctant to pick players from powerhouse Agidel Ufa, currently two-time defending champions of the Women’s Hockey League. Whatever the thinking behind that decision was, the situation ameliorated when Agidel head coach Denis Afinogenov joined the national-team staff in 2018, but it was not a good look for Chistyakov given that he also coaches Agidel’s arch-rivals Tornado Moscow Oblast (whether he will stay on as Tornado’s coach now remains to be seen). And what happened with Iya Gavrilova? A star forward for Russia, she vanished from the national-team set-up after the loss to Germany in 2017, as did, at least for a time, another very good attacking player in Alexandra Vafina. There has been talk of a falling-out between Gavrilova and Chistyakov; whatever transpired, it was deeply regrettable for the Russian team.

It was really only in the first part of this decade that the Russian women’s squad began to establish itself as a perennial top-five team, and to Chistyakov’s credit, they did not slip back from that during his tenure. But the program did seem to plateau, and in the end I expect that that was what led the Russian Hockey Federation to make a change. As I said, not enough forward progress, and not enough results.

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Oxana Bratishcheva scores the winner in Russia’s historic win over Canada at the 2018 U18 Worlds. (Image Source)

As for new senior team head coach Yevgeni Bobariko, his youth national sides have definitely delivered both progress and results. The 45-year-old from Nizhny Novgorod, a long-time forward for Torpedo during his playing career, took over the U18 team in 2016-17 (the same time that Chistyakov became coach of the senior side). The U18s promptly won bronze at the 2017 Worlds, though that was the only Worlds medal that they won on his watch. In fact, their two fourth-place finishes since then merely match what the senior team accomplished over the past two years, but unlike Chistyakov’s squad, Bobariko’s has shown real progress in catching up with Canada and the U.S. At the 2018 World Championship in Russia, the U18s became the first European team ever to beat a North American side at the competition when they defeated Canada 3-2. And this past January at the 2019 Worlds in Japan, they showed that it was no fluke, either, losing a one-goal game to the U.S. in the group stage and taking Canada to overtime in the semifinal. There is still a gap to be closed, but the U18 team under Bobariko showed that it can play the Canadians and Americans very tough indeed.

Bobariko also, in 2017, became the first head coach of Russia’s newly-founded U16 girls’ team; since then they have won gold at two out of three European Cup tournaments (2017 and 2019), and bronze at the 2018 tournament. True, the North Americans do not take part in the European Cup tournament, but there have been some solid opponents at those competitionss nonetheless, and two gold medals in three tries is a real accomplishment.

In addition to the obvious progress and results, Bobariko has one other selling point that will have been attractive to the Russian Hockey Federation: continuity. Many of the players who have graduated from the U18 program in the past few years are moving into the senior team, and they will now be reunited with a coach they know well, and under whom they have had success (at least one veteran player knows Bobariko too; he coached SKIF Nizhny Novgorod in the late 2000s, when his lineup included a young Olga Sosina). It will be very interesting to see what kind of a squad he chooses, and we will get our first look at a Bobariko senior national-team roster late next month, when the Russian national side heads to Finland for a five-nations tournament.

The above-mentioned Denis Afinogenov, head coach of Agidel Ufa, will remain on the national-team staff as Bobariko’s assistant, and well-respected goalie coach Sergei Mylnikov, jr., is joining the program as well. Afinogenov will also retain the head-coaching job with Russia’s “B” women’s national team (usually referred to as the Olympic team); it is good to hear that the Russian Hockey Federation intends to keep its secondary national team going, as it provides useful opportunities for international experience.

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The task of continuing Bobariko’s nice run with the youth teams falls to Alexander Syrtsov, named today as head coach of both the U18 and U16 national sides. It’s a very important job, and will not be easy, but Syrtsov does have copious experience coaching girls’ hockey. He has been Bobariko’s assistant with the national teams for the past couple of seasons, and since 2013 has been coach the Moscow Oblast Selects team (thanks to Alexander Agapov for that information) — they won the Under-18 women’s national championship this year. Syrtsov’s first games in charge of the U18 team are coming up very quickly; the squad will be in Calgary starting next week to take part in Hockey Canada’s Summer Showcase. The roster, which we talked about here yesterday, had already been assembled before today’s news, but it will now be up to the 39-year-old Syrtsov how it is deployed.

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Yevgeni Bobariko at work. (Image Source)

And so Russian women’s hockey is very much entering a new era this summer. First, the country’s professional league added its first foreign team in China’s Shenzhen KRS Vanke Rays, and now there is a wholesale change in the national-team coaching situation. It will make, obviously, for a very interesting 2019-20, and we should bear in mind that all of this is happening as Russia looks forward to likely hosting the senior top-division Women’s World Championship for the first time ever; the 2022 edition of that tournament will reportedly be awarded to Ufa in the near future.

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Thank you for reading!