Ozoliņš’s experience as a head coach is very little – 2017/2018. at the beginning of the 2018 season, he coached the Kontinental Hockey League team Riga “Dinamo”, however, he left the position already at the end of September, when the team had played only 16 games and experienced a streak of 12 losses.
“It was a very cool experience. I myself went to the team manager Jura Savickas and told him that I would not be able to fulfill what I had promised, so it was time to fire me. He asked me to reconsider the decision, but I told him that I would not change it. I myself refused to continue leading, because it was mathematically impossible for us to collect enough points to reach the playoffs,” Ozoliņš recalls in the interview.
From this experience, he concluded that it is not possible to achieve high results in the long term with desire alone. “In the short term, with fighting spirit and a lot of circumstances coming together, yes, but in the long term, you need a set of players who can do it. My biggest mistake was thinking that it was possible to achieve a result in the long term with such means.”
“I also realized that hockey is developing and you have to learn. Even now, if you want to link your career with this sport, you have to follow the new trends. In any industry, knowledge is borrowed from each other,” adds the legendary hockey player.
In the future, he worked for a longer time as an assistant head coach in another league unit of the aggressor state, Nizhniy Novgorod “Torpedo”, in the previous two seasons he was a scout of the National Hockey League unit Colorado “Avalanche”, but this winter Ozoliņš is the assistant of the head coach of the Latvian hockey team, Harijs Vītoliņš, on the way to the Milan-Cortina Olympic Games.
“Overall, this experience of mine was very cool, I saw how it happens. I like this job, I know it. Yes, the things I haven’t learned yet, I don’t know, but I will learn them if I want to connect my life with this profession,” says Sandis Ozoliņš.
Although Vītoliņš long hoped to attract Ozoliņš as an assistant in the national team, so far the agreement has been reached only until the end of the Olympic Games. “I am listened to and heard. I don’t know if I comply, it already depends on them. I try not to push myself too much with my conclusions and vision, because the specifics of the national team are different from training a team in the regular championship,” Ozoliņš says about working with the national team. “That’s why I’ve decided not to try to teach the players anything that could affect the game in their club, so that it doesn’t happen that I was told to play this way in the club, told this way in the national team and now I can’t cope. In the club, more time is given to understand the tendencies, strengths and weaknesses of each player, in the national team there is much less time left for that.”
Although Ozoliņš had both injuries and addictions during his career, he played at the highest level until he was 41 years old. The legendary defender explains that it takes a lot of training to do something like that.
