At the 2002 Asian Championship, Gopichand recounted in his essay in ‘Go’ how a Star Sports reporter doubled up as his coach. This may sound bizarre but it reflects India’s grave neglect in investing in building a pool of top-quality coaches. Even after nearly two decades of this episode, India continues to suffer. What’s worse, the system is yet to agree on how to address this critical issue.
Senior players have a huge respect for retired coaches Mohammed Arif and Ganguly Prasad. The two have been conferred with India’s most coveted award for coaches – the Dronacharya award.
Prakash Padukone, Vimal Kumar and Gopichand were reluctant coaches. They were more keen on building a supportive ecosystem, after their retirement, than take on coaching full time.
India’s biggest grouse is the absence of a contingent of high quality coaches at various levels. Only recently, the Olympic Gold Quest, in association with PPBA, has started a system to produce eight coaches a year.
Nandan Kamath, co-founder of GoSport Foundation says, “Trial and error coaching can do for youngsters but won’t work with professionals. Also, personal progression among coaches is rare – most of them remain static while attempting to solve problems.”
He believes India needs to “build a whole core community of coaches who help children fall in love with the game. He calls the first step as FUNdamentals – making sure kids have fun while learning. This way they are more open to learning faster.”
Interestingly, the new trend is of aging players setting up academies. While most see it as part of their retirement plan, only a few are taking up coaching seriously.
Also read: How Indian badminton became global powerhouse, new book reveals
Anup Sridhar and Arvind Bhat have taken coaching seriously in their academies. Anup Sridhar believes that “It’s better to be a young coach than an old player.” Both have been top players for India. Arvind Bhat has a rare feat of winning the German Open when he was 35. Tom John believes “Anup could have done much better if he had an elite foreign coach to back him.”
At the Infosys Foundation press conference in 2019, Prakash said, for India to attract good coaching talent, it has to make the profession attractive through good salaries and more training opportunities abroad.
Jwala Gutta is miffed that India is not giving enough attention to coaching doubles players. She suggests a separate training and coaching centre for doubles. She plans to focus on doubles coaching at her 50 plus acre, 14-court academy, which is scheduled to start later in 2020.
Streamline the system
Gopichand has been vocal about the need for streamlining the way Indian badminton is managed. He told a TV reporter, “For a sport to develop, we need coaches, we need players, a professional system, and a disciplined structure. We haven’t groomed any coaches. We haven’t started anything, we need to focus on the domestic structure.”
Prakash too thinks that, “If we have good coaches to train coaches, we can take the game to the next level.”
To a probing question on fixing the coaching problem after Sindhu’s victory in 2019, Gopichand said, “We actually have a big vacuum in terms of producing coaches of quality and it’s not a training program. It’s an ecosystem issue. So, we need to work harder to bridge that gap. It’s a question without an easy answer and till that time, foreign coaches need to support.”
“It’s also our own doing. Because, we have grown too fast and the infrastructure around us hasn’t grown enough. That’s a big problem we have and we need to sort it out. We need to talk about it and collectively find an answer.”
To a question on who’s an ideal coach, Gopichand answered, “Their results are your results and that connect is very important. Selfless service to the athlete is very important, and it’s a stressful and draining journey… almost like parenting your kid.”
Is it a fair question to ask Gopichand that he has been the Chief Coach of Indian badminton for 14 years and why couldn’t he have addressed this problem, especially when he is known to be influential with BAI.
Also read: Chinese coaches inspired Gopichand to use heavy weight training to beat foreign players
Need for a sports scientist
India has started believing in using sports medicine and sports science only recently. If seen from the lens of ‘what it takes to win’ India will need more robust sports scientists to work closely with the coaches.
In the book ‘Game Changers – How a Team of Underdogs and Scientists Discovered What it Takes to Win,’ João Medeiros tries to prove the predominant role of sports scientists in transforming United Kingdom’s performance – from 36th place in 1996 Olympics to 2nd place in 2016 Rio Olympics.
One of the interesting factors the author studied is how a software helped coaches become more efficient observers. This intervention was based on a study which showed that “during a match, international football coaches could recollect only 30% of the key factors that determined a successful performance. Worse, 45% of what they could recall was simply wrong.”
The study also looked at gymnastic coaches. When asked to detect technical differences between two routines, “the expert coaches identified more false positives.”
These studies shattered the belief that coaches had special expertise in accurately recalling and judging “the critical elements of sports performance.” The study by Hughes and Franks argues that the accuracy of observation of athletic coaches is no different from that of eyewitnesses during a crime.
“There are a number of similarities between the situation of the coach observing an athletic performance and that of the eyewitnesses to a criminal event. Both were prone to errors induced by arousal, cognitive bias and lack of focus.”
The other factor that worked wonders for UK was a mantra Humphrey Walters, a businessman, who in 1997 completed an eleven-month round-the-world yacht race, had shared with England’s rugby coach Clive Woodward, “Success comes not because of one thing done a hundred percent better, but because of a hundred things done one percent better.”
The coach wrote, “It changed the real dynamic of how we coached, because historically most coaching is about telling the players what to do. That was very old-fashioned.”
If India truly aspires to become a top badminton playing nation, most of these lessons would come in really handy.
