Rodger Schmidt Edit
Wed, 9/29 10:44PM • 33:46
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
athletes, coach, working, curling, team, element, game, good, people, play, sport, coaching, olympics, mental, skip, technique, stone, roger, energy, succeed
SPEAKERS
Paul Barnett, Rodger Schmidt
Paul Barnett 00:00
So Good afternoon, Mr. Roger Schmidt and welcome to the great coaches podcast.
Rodger Schmidt 00:04
Thank you. I appreciate having the chance to chat with somebody about all this stuff from time to time.
Paul Barnett 00:10
Well, I like a lot of people love watching the sport of curling when it comes around every four years. It's such a graceful sport, very relaxing. So I'm really looking forward to, to hearing from you about all things curling, but maybe just a really simple question. If I could begin with Roger, where are you in the world today? And what have you been up to so far,
Rodger Schmidt 00:29
you want to know, my day, I'm trying to work a lot less. I'm actually in my curling Hall, the facility in kousaka, bridgie. Switzerland, we have four sheets right outside and during the day, there's not much going on. So I come in here and I kind of get my bearings and do my like two or three hours of work day and then then move on. But today's bit special, because I'm actually playing a game tonight in Zurich, we play like seven or eight games a year. So after this, I have to get out there and practice a bit because at my age, I don't throw them very well anymore. And we play in the not very Super League sort of guys who used to play very well. But don't we don't practice and play by so but it still gets a little competitive. So I've got to get up practice right after this interview.
Paul Barnett 01:08
Hopefully this conversation gets you into the mental space to dominate the game this evening.
Rodger Schmidt 01:13
Okay, well, we hope so. Roger, I'd
Paul Barnett 01:16
like to start with a pretty broad question, actually, because you've been to the Olympics five times as a coach, as well as participating in numerous World Championships. Actually, it's a very, very long list on your Wikipedia page. But you also have firsthand experience working with some really great coaches. I understand Phil, drobnick, and Olga, Adrianne over from Russia are both very highly respected in the cooling world, and you've worked with them. So I would like to ask from this perspective, what is it you think the great coaches do differently?
Rodger Schmidt 01:45
I think the number one thing is, I think as to be a great coach, I think you need to be open to new ideas. And you also have to keep, keep being prepared to rebuilding. And the thing is what you done in the last few years, somebody else is going to be doing that. And you got to be you have to be creative. And you have to be always kind of look for ways to look to go forward in your programs and your messaging, and your consistency, and kind of relate your programs and your training to moving forward and not keep doing the same things you always did. Because what's what worked last year might not work this year. [PB1] So I think the openness that I've seen in coaches is what I would suggest that people do more of
Paul Barnett 02:23
killings often been described as chess on ice. In every four years, the Olympics comes around and we all sit there transfixed. You know, it's so graceful. It's a very peculiar sport. But it's also it's something very egalitarian or something like I feel like when I watch it, anyone could do it, though I know that's not the case. But what's the role of a curling coach? Can you could you talk us through how you prepare the team,
Rodger Schmidt 02:48
I think the chess are nice analogy, which I actually have heard before is pretty accurate, except people miss one thing, if you're going to make a move on the chessboard, and move a rock to some position, there isn't going to be a guard in the way and you smash into or, you know, you actually have to execute it. It's not just a thought process. I mean, making the right decision is only a part but can you actually do it. So the combination between the mental things you need in chess, and then having the skills to actually complete the move on the king or the queen or whatever, you can tell my chest is not as good as my curling. But I think it's a it's a good analogy, because I think maybe you get to this kind of thing later, but it kind of fits now. I mean, there's the thinking aspect and the doing aspect. And you have to be able to combine both. And if you spend too much time thinking you don't do very successful doing. In other words, you don't execute. And that's that balance. Like when your head gets full of things, like too much chess in there, you're not going to succeed.[PB2]
Paul Barnett 03:50
You're the author of what I understand to be the most authoritative book on curling, it's called the five elements of curling technique before the fifth element is to do with the mental aspect of it. But I was wondering if you could just take us through what those five elements are. And just describe that for our listeners.
Rodger Schmidt 04:05
That's kind of interesting. I mean, there have been a lot of books written in sport of curling on technique, but I don't think one that's that may be combined things together quite as much. But the idea of the five elements of technique was that we were going to do series and have the five elements of mental the five elements of strategy and the five elements of physical. That was sort of the the intention back when I was with us in I think 22,008 2010, something like that. But my approach to five elements is and I come into coaching curling from a very from really development point of view when quite frankly, when I started coaching curling there weren't very many coaches, and there were hardly any good ones because coaching in our sport that I'm talking 2025 years ago, it was somebody whose father or somebody's uncle or some guy who just wanted to hang around and buy hamburgers for the team was designated as a coach, fortunately, and I'm very grateful now. It's very professional, as you said. with Phil and Olga and people, you know, the sport has developed. But I was added a long time before that, when I was getting athletes, other people had worked with the athletes, but you don't want to have to redo everything. When an athlete has, you know, bad habits and just bad fundamentals. So the idea of five elements was, as a coach, I sat down, I said, What are the five things I would like to have in the technique of technique of delivering a curling stone, that the other things I have to do that are just details, I don't have to rebuild everything, right. If these five things are in the technique, then that's a good start. For an athlete. That's how the concept came about. There wasn't really good things that went in a program in a development way,
Paul Barnett 05:40
I would love to talk through them, I was watching a video on on YouTube where you're being interviewed, and you were there with the US coach or the senior coach, and maybe one of the junior coaches. And it was just, it was a very simple explanation of the steps that you go through in technique. And I think the ability of any coach to break down a skill into the steps that need to be executed is a skill in itself. So I'd actually be very interested to hear you run through the five as they're detailed in the book,
Rodger Schmidt 06:08
okay, element one, I sort of look at as what you do before you do anything. In other words, it's the setup, it's getting your body and stone in position. And it also means you have to find your center, because curling is my whole teaching method is the center of body mass of the stone and of the body. So the element number one is just getting your lines lined up knowing how you approach the target, because if you're wrong there, nothing else goes forward in a good way you're gonna have, you're gonna have conflicting energies, number two is building the energy and transferring the energy. And there's energy transfer, because the stone has no energy, the stone gets its energy from the body. So transferring the athlete, knowing how to transfer energy to the body, keeping it on line, of course, and speed. There's also an inner body transfer in there, because in the action that we have, which is very specific, there's one foot in what we call the hack, which is your pivot point. And so one leg drives and the other leg has to take the balance. So you're you have an inner body transfer from the from the drive leg to the sliding foot, that sliding leg. So that's element element two. And again, the center of body mass has to be consistent, both those element three gets much simpler. It's a sliding phase, when the beautiful part you see that looks so elegant when you're watching on TV that is elegant with the top athletes not so elegant. For people who are still struggling to learn the skills is a feel, you have to feel what transfer you've made to the stone, because now the stone has the energy. So element three is feel element four is finish releasing the stone, putting it on target. There's a lot of little details in those last two, but it's basically just feel and finish. And element five was designed because as the mental aspect of it, if you don't understand what you're doing, no matter how beautiful you do it, you're not gonna have much success, because it's the knowledge. It's what I call the curling intellect, you have to have curling intellect, knowing the ice, knowing what will happen if I throw it this way, if I throw it that way. And this happens in all sports. And most most good athletes do this fairly automatically, because they've been trained, but not at the development level. So if we brought it to a cadence, element five really is curving intellect, like knowing the shot, if you don't know the shot, how are you going to succeed in the shot, you could make a pretty good argument that that could be element one and the others could be pushed along to 2345. And I think it's a good argument that's valid, but it also means it's like a shot routine, after you finished the stone and your stone is gone. And it's going to go hit another stone and roll perfectly to its to its to that target, you still aren't finished with the process, because what you learned on that shot may be very important to when you get into the hack to play the next shot, which will be the shot after the next game playing. So it's really a shot cycle. And that I think helps helps athletes and to understand the throwing of the stone. And understand which element am I working in now and it made us build I think very strong programs where the athlete could really know okay, I'm working on the transfer isn't quite right, I need to set my foot position or angle my foot a little different. So then from that you get into the details when you're working with the athletes, it's important for the learning process, because then the athlete knows specifically what he's working on at any given point in time. And he can see how it all fits and builds together[PB3] .
Paul Barnett 09:20
Just looking at that last element. I mean, it's, it's very much about the mind. And in fact, I found this quote from you where it says the fifth element is the most important element, you can become as skilled as you want to be and have a beautiful technical delivery. But if the brain doesn't give you the message of what to do with the stone, it won't work. And so I wanted to ask how would you go about coaching to improve you call the intellect or decision making or choices? How do you how do you coach someone to improve in that area?
Rodger Schmidt 09:48
Well, you've really hit the point because I think any skills to succeed become automatic, and you can train elements 1234 to become automatic and they look good in the skills we find but You may not have success because you threw a perfect stone. But you didn't realize that it wasn't going to crawl that extra three inches at the end. This is one example or you threw a perfect stone but you didn't realize that you that your, that your sweepers who actually make that stone work for you had no chance sweep it because it was beautiful, but it was too strong, or whatever the issue is. So the mental aspect becomes the most important and I think this is I think all coaches you talk to when they get down to the to the refining the skills to be the same. And here's the example. There's actually an energy transfer in the mental aspect because somewhere you have to transfer your thinking to feeling and we developed in that five elements we develop a sort of a cadences and we would teach say, know the shot, feel the shot finish the shot. So it's a nice rhythm for athletes. Okay, did you know the shot Yeah, I know the shot, okay, then you got to feel the shot, you have to make that transition from knowing to feeling that's training, that doesn't happen automatically, for everyone. And not only that, let's throw a little world temperature pressure into that right now. So making that transfer from knowing to feeling in practice is easy, or relatively, you can not have the stress and pressure. But now when your brain starts to kick off other things which become emotional, which come from spirits come from all kinds of things come from the lights being bright, and you're not used to it, whatever, it's hard to make that clean transfer from going to feel it so or even a great athletes come into the hack sometimes. And they're just not that 110% confident that it's going to go right? Because there's interference. And when your brain gets too involved, if you can't block the brain out, block the thinking thinking part transferred the feeling, that's when mistakes occur. So that's where the mental aspect comes in.[PB4] So you'd say made me right into where we we felt we had to write another five elements of mental for curling?
Paul Barnett 11:48
Roger, is there a moment that you can articulate or recall? That is your greatest success with taking a team implementing this technique and then seeing their results? Is that Is there one instance or a couple that you could just to share with us.
Rodger Schmidt 12:02
The thing is, it's a process. I mean, I if I see people just performing better and performing consistently, that's really the reward. I mean, goalie coaches don't get paid very much money at all. So you're not doing it for that. You're doing it because you get a love of the sport for the end, because you're helping athletes to succeed last last year with the with this junior team that it wasn't serving official role, but because these young athletes asked me to help them because I had stopped with Russia the year before and wasn't going to do any more Olympics, I had sort of retired a year before the COVID already, just seeing them go from having no chance to winning the Swiss championship was pretty rewarding because it was the mental their skills were okay. But they believed so much in themselves. And they worked so hard at their mental side, that it just for at least that last two weekends of the championship got easy. And they succeeded. That was rewarding for me. The reason I took on the challenges in my in my facility here, one of the young guys trains here all the time. And they were kind of the four guys who they're in junior. They're their teams that all aged out. And they were like leftovers. And so they're from other parts of Switzerland, but none of the other four guys, none of them had a team. So they just kind of were the leftovers and they're all in kind of their last year of junior, and they were playing like leftovers when we first got here. But then they really took on the challenge. And they really know where different dots from different towns, but they pulled together in the right moments to succeed. And I think you want to make your athletes better. And you really, it's really nice when they get when they have the success when they work hard. And then they overachieve a little bit at the right time.
Paul Barnett 13:46
You've coached national teams from the Czech Republic, Italy, Austria, USA and Russia. And so I'm really curious to know what have you personally learned about adjusting your style of coaching to fit in with these different cultures.
Rodger Schmidt 14:02
When you copy their interview, I actually looked at that because I saw what you have written. I've actually worked with eight national programs for eight different countries for the last 25 years. Now I haven't noticed the differences so much. There's little cultural differences that that maybe I should be more aware of. But curling has its own culture, an athlete sort of sort of gets into the groove of curling, it's quite a nice community in the international currency world. People have great respect for each other in the countries and so that hasn't been a great difference. I haven't seen that much different. I mean, my my my Russian athletes that no different than my American athletes, and I know that the political Yes, I just did say that. Because people have fundamental level are great people at the fundamental level. And I've really found that in work with
Paul Barnett 14:42
the athletes. So when you move into these new teams, whether it's this leftovers in Switzerland, or whether it's the Russian national team, what are the first things you do when you set that team up when they come under your lead?
Rodger Schmidt 14:56
I'll get to that question but I must say that the leftovers from Switzerland are the current silver medalist in the world and World Junior. So the leftovers. I may have been a little harsh when I called them that. I hope they forgive me. I'm sure they will.
Paul Barnett 15:10
So I'm just interested, you take over a new team and you've done it so often in your career, whether it's this Swiss group that you've picked up, or whether you got a Russia or the USA team, I'm just wondering what your routine is. When you first start with a new the new team, how do you set them up? What is it you do,
Rodger Schmidt 15:27
I try to get on ice and play with them. Like get them playing, just get on ice. Because when when people when when you step on the ice, your crew, you're in the curling sport, it doesn't matter where you're from the nationality so you start to see how people that are reacting move, I watch videos if it's if it's if I'm working with Kim higher level that I've got videos, I watch videos, because I really want to see what they do well before I go in there and mess everything up. I want to I think you build teams on their strengths. And I don't mean just technical because technical, easy to adjust more the mental side how they carry themselves, their habits, good habits, create good teams, even if you mask them for a while the bad habits come out come out at the wrong times when the pressure comes on. So I really look at that first. [PB5] I don't think I've treated any athletes differently in any nations I've worked with, I've treated them with respect and dignity and athletes and try to work with them on the same level. I don't get too close to my athletes. I think it's a bonus when the athletes like me, but it's more importantly, that we learn how to work together. And I don't want to athletes liking me too too much because it can take away from their own I think their own aspect and their own they should be they should they shouldn't be playing for me they should be playing for themselves and their team and their teammates. So keeping that sort of, sort of you know, warmth I don't mean I'm I'm pretty warm person. So from that perspective, we don't mean you know, that I'm standing there with with, with a whimper hatchet is really building the right rapport with the athletes so that you can, when you have to trigger them that you can trigger them. [PB6] When I
Paul Barnett 16:59
listen to your interviews and read some of the articles you've written in the cooling use that you've actually used the word energy a lot. And I it's an interesting word, you used it before, when you're describing the five techniques, it's an interesting word because it's there's something intangible about energy, it's not necessarily something you can see it but you can't always necessarily feel it'll define it. And what I wanted to do is just think about negative energy for a minute, because I'm sure when you're at these Olympics or World Championships, your teams could get very stressed, it's long as you can take a while to play a game, there's a lot of tension, you're sitting around, you're watching, you're getting stuck in your own head. And I'm wondering if there's any particular routines or ways that you found to sort of keep the team calm, the stress them and sort of get their energy flowing in the right direction again,
Rodger Schmidt 17:45
definitely you you, you said some ways things, I mean, you have to be prepared, technically. So which we talked about. So out of the technical aspect, I tried to get the athletes to break it down so that they're in the game, they're not thinking about their technique[PB7] , it has to be automatic, but you still have your keys, you have your three technical keys, I placed my knee here, and then I'm good, I make the transfer, I feel the weight, whatever. each athlete has their own three technical keys. And that keeps them grounded and keeps them consistent. It's a place to go when they're under stress and pressure, when they just miss the shot there. Just go back to your routine, go back to your your ABCs, whatever our coaches have different ways of describing, and make sure in our training that the athlete, he goes into that game prepared, he's got his keys, same thing mentally, you need to have your mental keys. So the format for example, each athlete, they do their routine they go through, they get prepared for their technical ease, and their mental keys, or whatever they are, I breathe this, this is what I do keeps me on the same same level. So you can keep all those walls and demons back off somewhere when the pressure starts and stay in your routine. And the good athletes do that very, very well. They don't let emotions rule and then overtake them at the wrong times. They can keep it clear. And they can make that continual transfer between thinking and feeling thinking and feeling because their thinking side of your brain, when under stress thinks it can think itself out of anything, right? So it just keeps firing thoughts. Most of ludicrous type that the poor athlete who's out there just trying to draw the forefoot I mean, come on. You've done this all time in practice, but now you have to do it. You can't get that thinking guy, the monkey on your shoulder that keeps wrapping in your ear there and saying things that you don't need to know at this point in time. If that analogy works, I'm not sure does Very much so. So I mean that's so the thing is, you know the preparation I mean, preparation is really a long process. I mean, we spend a lot of time on nice before championships, almost to the point of where you feel like maybe it's too much but but you have to to routines is there is there
Paul Barnett 19:49
project on a curling team, one of the players is the skip and it's their job to determine strategy because in a lot of tournaments, the coach isn't allowed to speak to the players. So So what do you look for when you're choosing the skip?
Rodger Schmidt 20:03
Well, he has to really the skip is the coach essentially on the eyes as well, because we can't continue the rules or Finally, probably keep rules in my mind, but they're probably going to start to change and they're going to allow more interaction with coaching. And I hope that's good for the sport. There's traditional so don't think coaches have so much involvement or even be in the building to go back far enough on tradition, but so yeah, you have to have a coach who your connection to him because of the strategy aspect. And he has to be sort of the, the key strategist in the game, the strategic leader, I call him, and he gets help from Legion system strategic leader, but you know, somebody has to be otherwise the game drags on too much, you can't have committee rules, because you're on time as well. So somebody has to show the crisp leadership, and you have to skip who, who can make those decisions mostly correctly and fairly quickly, and anticipate what's going to happen more more on the strategy side. So you need someone who has a curling intellect to require for the game number one, but he also has to be able to convince his team that he's always right, and nobody's always right. But you have to convince your team that this is the right thing to do. So you don't get into little skirmishes. And what are we doing this for? Well, this is what we always do when things go wrong, and you don't get the muttering and the negativity, energy negative you've said before, so he has to be able to make the people around him better, which is the real key to leadership, and he has to get make the people around him confident in him. And then they'll perform better a lot of those things that a coach would normally do, right? If you analyze what I just said. So he asked a lot of coaching aspect abilities on the leadership side keeping the team going. And also interactions with the other, the opponent, which is somewhat limited in curling, but not completely limited. Because there's a lot of it's a competition, you're playing gifts for other players. It's not like ice hockey, where you can take them to the corner. But there's a lot of things going on that the public doesn't see in the communications and in the way the body languages and the way you aspect teams. And when you talk about energy before, I always think that on that sheet, it's a fight for energy, like like, I want my teams to own that sheet. And they let the other team play there because they have to have an opponent. But they're, they own the sheet. And that's all part of energy. A lot of it is subliminal, your skip has to be really aware of the dynamic that's happening on your team, and the other team and when to make this move when to make that move. So yeah, finding that guy isn't easy. and developing him usually takes some time. He was talking about the skip.[PB8]
Paul Barnett 22:34
Yeah, Roger, I've heard you talk about your experience with the USA team, the Olympics in Vancouver, and you said, the skip went cold. And there was no backup plan. I'm really interested, could you share this experience with us about what happened and how it changed your coaching philosophy as
Rodger Schmidt 22:48
a result? I sure could Yeah, having the skip on the men's team that we're talking about is now the reigning Olympic champion, which is fantastic. Love the guy. But in that in that Olympics, I mean, hey, we're all people who are athletes, john went cold in first two or three games. And he was younger than but a wonderful talent and a guy with great leadership abilities to and real honest, great love for the game really always enjoyed working with him. And I think he was me. But so what if you miss last shots? Where do you where you have to close up the game, relatively, you know, a shot you make 95% of the time, and you do it more than once. Something's not quite firing, right? The athlete is not in his groove. He's not in his placement. So that was I mean, my criticism of us. And I mean, all of us feel drobnick was working with this to was, then Phil is still developing as a coach. But I think it's just fantastic that they go back and that they won the last Olympics. So I must say that again. Yeah. But this just show and I think that your interview here, this shows the growing pains you have to go through to become a great athlete, you gain strength from that experiences. But back to your question on the coaching aspect. I mean, I think the game needs to develop a little bit more because you need a backup plan. And we need to work more on the backup plans. I think as our sport develops, I mean, you can you can play lead on a team, that is number one position, but you should also be able to play another position. if something changes, you should work harder and harder. There's no reason that you can't do more than one task in our sport. You throw those two stones here, you throw them there, you just become that good. But you need to also then have the opportunity to do it more often. And I think that's what we break down. We don't juggle our teams up to play certain competitions and say Hey, why don't we play this competition and put this guy in gold? You know, that's the type of thing we in the past haven't done that enough then consequently, there's been traditionals in the game who say well, you never change the game. So you have what your your play number three on the team and that's it. That's your life. I mean, I started out playing as number one with the greatest game in Canada that back then I became a script later and got to World Championships and you're one Europeans doing that. sentence to live forever. It was a lot of stuff. But it doesn't mean that you that you can't do more. If you're an athlete, you look at sports baseball, when the pitcher starts throwing it over the plate and it's breaking ball isn't breaking, and the balls are flying over the fence behind them, they take them out. If the goalie in a hockey, the red lights blinking behind them, they take them out. They don't take them out to penalize them. They take them out to save them, they take them out because they don't want to why ruin your confidence more, take a break, you'll be back tomorrow, regroup, have a chance to get yourself back together. We haven't done those things in curling very much. It's been well, President coaches, and there's been traditional sports and so it's criticism, I vowed after that, that I would not have a team that I couldn't have confidence that that somebody else could step in and skip if we run into a problem[PB9] . I mean, what if COVID hits? What if you get sick, then you're just all gonna say okay, well, we're done, you know, go play these games, we're just gonna lose, lose. So every team I've worked on after that I've, we've, you know, we prepare for that we prepare for it. We say if this person can't play, here's how we lined it up. And we'll practice that routine. If this person can't play, this is how we will ended up. So you're prepared beforehand, and then the dynamic doesn't shift too much because you've prepared for it. So after that Olympics, yes, I'm with my teams, I've made sure that we add as much as possible other alternatives should something go wrong, whatever that something is,
Paul Barnett 26:27
I'd like to build on this idea of changing the dynamic in the team a little bit if I could, Roger, because I've got a another really good quote from you, where you say, we need to demand more of our athletes, the good player on the wing is going to give you the game that you need, you put him at center, he's going to have to adapt to that position. I don't think it's wrong to ask this of our athletes. So it actually led to think are there any values or behaviors that you always expect people in your team to adopt?
Rodger Schmidt 26:56
Well, we always want to be a we're not a me, and I want my athletes everyone out there to have a big ego. But I want them to know how to use it for the benefit of the team. And not just the benefit of them. I think we worked a lot on that. And teams I've worked with, you know, we've used the slogan, I mean, ego, you need ego, but you put the W in front of it. It's a weego you change the ego to ego. Because if you have the right ego, then we go, we built that into our star slogans to save. And that's the kind of athletes I want. You're not playing for yourself. You're playing for a team. And I think very rarely has that broken down in teams I played with, we may have not succeeded, but we always played with the right, right energy in that in that sense, if I use that word again,[PB10]
Paul Barnett 27:41
what do you what do you enjoy most about coaching?
Rodger Schmidt 27:44
That's a tough one. Now that I've sort of stopped. I don't get close to my athletes, but I really love my athletes. there's a there's a professional distinction there. And succeeding, succeeding where he or overachieving overlooked, because the feeling that the people the athletes get when you do that, you've done something special, I haven't had the luxury to coach teams that much that one all the time. I mean, we've had some good runs from time to time with Russian with Russian women, especially, you know, we run a lot of medals. So that was rewarding. And I guess you know, kind of, when you see people that get it, like if we talk about the mental side, or try to get when the athletes really start believing in what they should be believing it because there's believing and there's thinking you're believing that How deep is your belief in yourself and your team? Because if you ask an athlete, yo, are we going to win today? Oh, yes, coach. But it's easy to say. But on the inside, you really believe[PB11] . And I'll give you an example of that we had when I started coaching the Russian team, Syd rover who had been successful already in a good team, and I've known them for a long time played against them. And we traveled the same circles. I went through this statistics like before coccinella. And I realized that when they got down two or three points, with three or four rounds left in the game, I couldn't find one competitive game where they came back on one. This is first year I guess I really started working with them seriously excited coach Russian men before that, but not them not to win. They argue with me save us not to Capri. No. I said Well, okay, we have a statistic here. Alexandra said, Alexander, go to your computer and find a game find the one. He said, Look, I don't have to go because there is no, they've never come back. So I challenged them and said you don't believe in yourselves. If you believed in yourself, you would come back and we had been talking about they were a really good team. But we wanted to become a great team. This is before trumpism destroyed the word great for other room for all of a civilization forever. But we wanted to be instead of just good team. We're really good team one great team. I said, great teams have to win a lot of time to have to win games that they never should have one. When you're behind. You should win the other team shouldn't let you back. But if you don't win games that you shouldn't have won, you will never be a great team. And so we had this discussion that said you just don't believe Because the first element of my five elements of mental, which we didn't put in formal book, but I've used forever, the first element is believing. And we spent the whole first season just working on believing with a with a really good team. So there's an end to the story. Eventually we get we're playing the university out, we played really well, we ended up in a gold medal game against Canada. And we were really playing strong. But that game we just started off, we were like four or five down. I don't exactly tell you but but four down, I think on the break, and fifth and 10 in game. So I came out and said, You have been telling me that you can come back in games, and that you believe enough to come back. I said, this would be a good time for you to prove that. That's pretty much our stop set. And of course the story comes back Yeah, they did came back and wondering, extra and actually just played like monsters. But the best part is story. We have a traditional, we had been winning that time. So we have traditional champagne in the room in the hotel room. And as we cracked the champagne, they all stopped and they stared me. And they said, Now coach, we know what you mean about believing that would be a rewarding moment, because that's kind of You see, well, they got it. But after that we went on a roll, we started to win just a ton of things like when I'm real good roll. And it just was a change, because it changed the belief. Now, we weren't afraid of getting behind anymore. You could play more offensive because you know, you can come back so you can take some more chances you can change your strategies. It just changes so many other dynamics are so many other things. And the power of your team changes. Because something goes wrong, you don't panic. Oh, we're so much stronger, a whole different form of believing than when we just read it on paper.[PB12]
Paul Barnett 31:42
But you've touched all over the world. Some great men and women, adults youths, what's the legacy you think you've left as a coach?
Rodger Schmidt 31:52
I choose to believe this. I suppose that the athletes that I've worked with can go back and say hey, it was great working Roger, he keeps I learned this from him. That was a good experience we had there but not talking name in lights talking to people in their hearts can say Hey, that was a great experience kind of like what I channeled now I suppose some schools would say that was the best glass champagne we had there. And that that's enough of the leg kind of legacy. [PB13] Seeing john Schuster when after all the time we spent together I mean, right out. Beside me here is the ice where we did a lot of training because they came over here to train. I've been lucky that people have come to train with me even years and thought it's kind of nice. I remember working with john Schuster and trying to throw these big, big heart clearing shots working on just that, and that will finish on him. And I said, Hey, john, you're using the little gun, you got to learn how to use the big gun. And then we just have fun without me to say okay, now that was a big gun show. Yeah, okay, now still a little gun, you know, just the finish and making it pop getting the right handle some of those little moments, you know, where you're working on something that it's enjoyable, you're having fun, but you're really fixing a skill that you're going to use sometime, you know, later on. So yeah, little things like that. I'm also I'm good to go through all the pains we've gone through with the athletes because I mean, we've suffered some some serious defeats. I mean, the Vancouver Olympics, what a joyous occasion when when things just don't work, you have that you have to be a grown up, you have to be strong, and you have to be good enough to take the good with the bad. And so I don't just think about all the words I think about the whole thing is kind of the process that I've gone through. Yeah.
Paul Barnett 33:25
Roger Schmidt. It's been wonderful chatting to you today and learning a little bit more about curling. I wish you all the best for your next foray into coaching and also for the game that you've got this evening.
Rodger Schmidt 33:36
Okay, yeah, tonight. Yeah, I'll be on my best. I gotta go practice now.
Paul Barnett 33:41
Thanks, Roger. Thanks.