Yuri YANCHENKOV
Scouting director
Unlike the other members Yuri’s involvement in hockey started differently. He is a graduate of Moscow State Linguistic University where he studied foreign languages and psychology. In the 1990s he made his way to hockey with the employment at the Sports Makers Agency, which was busy organizing hockey tours of Russian elite teams to North America.
Quite soon (in 1998) he became a scout at the NHL Tampa Bay Lightning and won a Stanley Cup in 2004. With his 10 years of the NHL scouting background he came to reinforce the KHL Central Scouting Bureau as a senior scout in 2009.
However, in 2013 he got an idea of an independent structure that could provide a better level of scouting services. That was the beginning of the National Scouting Association, where Yuri works as Scouting Director and is also concerned with the psychological aspect of scouting. He tries to get at the root and predict a player’s future career, which is influenced by their behavior on and off the ice.
Yuri’s enthusiasm and energy powers the whole team.
