Vasili Podkolzin: A Star in the Making

https://en.khl.ru/news/2019/06/20/416648.html

My favourite parts from the article,

You’re just 17 years old, sitting on the SKA’s bench during a home game against the League’s leader and the coach says: “Get ready! You’re going with Gusev and Datsyuk!” Probably, many young players dream about such a phrase, but for Vasily Podkolzin it became true. After a few seconds he jumped over the boards, and for the first time, he hit the ice in the KHL. “At first I’ve been told that I’ll be the 13th forward. Something like, go there, watch, and learn,” Vasily Podkolzin remembers his debut. ‘I spent two periods on the bench; I was quite cold. Then Ilya Vorobyov speaks out loud the next line: Gusev – Datsyuk – Podkolzin. It was quite a shock, so I say Nikita: ‘Gus, my legs are shaking, I can’t do it.’ He suggested me to breathe out, and I started playing better.” The 17-year-old forward recognized that he was long filled with emotions after the game, getting some sleep only the next morning.

“In 2014 I moved from the White Bears to Vityaz, bringing some players with me,” Dekin goes on. “Of course, Vasily was in the first line. He already was a leader. But only on the ice, not in the locker room. But in his last year of school hockey, he grew up a lot and became wiser. It happened that after my speech in the locker room he would ask me to leave to have a short speech himself.”

“Vasily is one of the few modern guys who you don’t need to push or to motivate: he loves hockey and is incredibly desirous of developing even further,” says Igor Dekin, one of Podkolzin’s youth coaches. “My belief is that talent is just 10-15% of success, the rest is hard work. Believe me, in these years I had many guys with more talent than Vasily. Maybe he’s not as coordinated as Andrei Kuzmenko is, but he has another style, he always had a powerful stroke. Some compare him to Valery Nichushkin, but Valery crashes the net from the side, Vasily always tries to play in the middle.”