Marina Maljkovic: "We've Become Very, Very Lazy"

The hall in Banja Luka was packed with coaches from across the region, the microphone moving from one speaker to the next, and then it was Marina Maljkovic’s turn. She hadn’t come to talk about zone defense or transition offense, but about something she had, by all appearances, been carrying with her for a while. The panel at the Adria sports conference was billed as a discussion on the future of coaching, and she used it to settle a score with the younger generation of colleagues.

She didn’t mince words. She said it bothers her when younger coaches, watching from the sidelines, sit in judgment of the work of people like Svetislav Pesic and Zeljko Obradovic, two men who won EuroLeague titles and led national teams while those same critics were just starting out.

“It bothers me a lot that so many colleagues, young coaches, of course know exactly where Svetislav Pesic went wrong, or think they’d do it far better than Zeljko. You can’t explain it, and all of us who’ve worked abroad know this, what so many people are actually doing. We’ve simply become very, very lazy. And today Spanish coaches are running Zvezda and Partizan, as far as I know,”

Marina Maljkovic said at the conference in Banja Luka.

The line about Zvezda and Partizan wasn’t a throwaway remark. The two biggest clubs in Serbian basketball, the clubs around which domestic coaching careers have been built for decades, currently have Spanish specialists on their benches. For someone who comes from the same environment where Pesic and Obradovic made their names, that’s proof enough that the domestic system isn’t where it should be, while younger coaches, in her view, would rather pick apart other people’s mistakes than work on improving themselves.

It’s worth pausing here on one discrepancy in how the media describe Maljkovic herself. In its report from the conference, B92 refers to her as the former head coach of Serbia’s women’s national team, while Telegraf states that she currently coaches Crvena zvezda’s women’s team. Neither outlet resolves the difference, so both descriptions remain on record exactly as reported.

The second part of her remarks was devoted to Spain, a country she held up as the opposite of the domestic situation. To her, that’s no accident or stroke of luck, but the result of a system that Serbia, in her words, has neglected for years.

“Spain is a fantastic example of a serious system when it comes to coaches. Spain as a country has an incredible system and school for coaches. That’s something we as a country are terribly neglecting. We have to invest, we have to work on ourselves above all,”

Maljkovic said, addressing the younger colleagues in the room in particular.

The Adria sports conference in Banja Luka brings together coaches and experts from across the region for precisely this reason, so that topics like this can be raised in front of an audience that actually understands them, rather than behind closed doors. The presence of Spanish coaches at the same gathering only sharpened the comparison, since the Spanish model, in Maljkovic’s telling, is exactly what’s missing from domestic basketball: an organized path from coaching license to a first-team bench, instead of a young coach relying only on his own opinion of other people’s decisions.

Behind all of it lies an uncomfortable symmetry for the domestic audience. For decades, Zvezda and Partizan were the proving ground where the very coaches Maljkovic named, Pesic and Obradovic, learned their trade. Today both benches are held by people from the country she praised as a model on that very same day. She didn’t need to prove that point; it’s enough to look at who currently sits on the benches in Belgrade.

Whether her message will change anything about how younger coaches approach the job is hard to say after a single conference. But as long as both of the country’s biggest benches are held by foreigners, it’s hard to argue with the main point she made in Banja Luka.