He never knew where he was going to end up. She wanted to take some time with the pools when she left synchronized swimming, but Andrea Fuentes (Valls, 1983) needed to share everything she had learned and after years of traveling around the world, she took the reins of the United States national team Synchronized swimming. He has qualified the American team for the Olympic Games after 16 years without competing in them and two bronze medals at the Doha World Cup. She talks about the fears, the changes and the harsh reality of women’s sports with El Periódico de Catalunya, from the Prensa Ibérica group.
When you retired, did you feel lost?
When I stopped being an athlete, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be a coach. I started exploring other fields to see what I liked. Honestly, I didn’t want to close myself to the world of synchro alone. I tried different things, but I always had my head in the pool. I felt like I had a lot of knowledge that I was keeping to myself, that I wasn’t sharing.
What made you take the step?
It coincided that some clubs started calling me to see what I would do after I retired and offered me one-week courses. They asked me to do the choreography for them, since I am very artistic. I liked it more and more. Then we started traveling with the family. We went every month to a different country to give the courses. My husband is a gymnast and he did the acrobatics part. We took our two newborn children and left. When four years passed we needed to stabilize and settle in a fixed place.
And he received the call from the United States.
I had been doing one-week courses a couple of times. The coach until then had serious problems and she left him. They called me to offer me the position of coach. I had never done it and it was a very different role. I told them I had no experience, but they didn’t care. They wanted me to lead the team and they trusted me more than I trusted myself, honestly. They wanted, in addition to having someone they knew, someone they could train with their principles. Mine coincided with what they wanted for the team.
What are they based on?
In the United States, they began to take mental health into account in sports before anyone else. And I had always made it my mission to train in synchro without losing respect for the athlete. With much more weight in the empowerment of athletes than through authority. I didn’t know how it was done because I had never seen it. I began to set up a system that aligned the values they wanted here with mine. And we’ve been like this for five and a half years. We started it from the deepest shit until now, when we won silver in the last world championships. These five years have cost a lot, honestly. There was almost no federation or structure when I arrived.
The artistic swimmingformerly known as synchronized, is one of the few sports where women have always had a leading role.
In our sport it is very common to have women as coaches. Now there are starting to be men, but it is easier for a woman to be a coach because we are already in this sport. In others, such as football, water polo or handball, I am surprised that there are not more women selectors.
Why do you think it happens?
I have tried to think what the reasons could be and I think it is a matter of custom. The fact of not seeing women serving as selectors makes others not even consider it. Instead, here it is: ‘Of course I can be a coach or a selector. I’ve seen it a thousand times.’ If you’ve never seen it, you really have to be someone who wants to change the rules to actually create the changes. They are not written rules, but they are what is socially established. We must encourage women to see it, that they are not the first and that it can be done.
Creating references is key.
Sight enters more than hearing. That is why it is more important that we see the example. It’s not that women don’t feel capable, it’s that they have never seen it and if you want to do something that you have never seen, it requires a type of character that is not so common. Not everyone cares what is established in society.
With her sporting career, it is clear that she has become one of them.
I am very happy to be able to be a reference. I had them as a swimmer, with Gemma Mengual, but as a coach I didn’t have any specific ones. I have references from different sports and good things about each coach I have had. I have been mixing things from different personalities, such as Pep Guardiola.
What have you adapted from it?
I read that he had learned from Johan Cruyff that you have to speak to each person in a different way so that it reaches them. Know what type of speech appeals directly to you. How to make each person, in their individuality, reach their maximum thanks to motivation. Each person has something different inside and what a coach should do is see what ignites the spark in each person. Guardiola inspired me to see that after being a good athlete you could be a good coach. They always told me that it couldn’t be done, and I always used him as an example.
USA It has always been a reference in sport. Do you notice the difference much?
Here, if you don’t dedicate yourself to women’s soccer or gymnastics, you can’t make a living from it. They are super famous and highly valued, and women’s soccer here is huge. For a girl to play soccer it is a minimum of 500 euros per month. There is a fierce competition of girls wanting to play women’s soccer that you don’t see in other sports. The US government gives nothing, not even a subsidy. It’s all private policies, sponsors and sponsors. Those who have easy marketing do it quickly and those who don’t, nothing. We do not have any support from the government and we have had to seek everything from private sponsors. In Spain, the Olympic Committee and the Higher Sports Council give money, scholarships… But not here. My swimmers, when they finish training, have to go to work to pay their bills.
2024-03-03 13:17:45
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