Need for technically strong coaches: McAfee

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Having regularly sent its paddlers to the Olympic Games since Seoul in 1988, it took 24 years for India to acknowledge the importance of a table tennis coach before Bhawani Mukherjee was awarded the Dronacharya this year.

A series of dismal shows in the event may have hurt the prospects of the coaches but not their spirit, as evidenced by the turnout at the USATT National Coaching Advisory Committee chairman Richard McAfee’s ‘coach the coaches’ programme, organised by Tenvic. And McAfee has the ideal fix for the problem ‘empower the roots’.

“If a country wants to see some good results in any sport, it has to improve the standards of the beginners and the result will start showing all the way up,” says McAfee, author of the acclaimed Table Tennis: Steps to Success.

According to McAfee, the sport doesn’t lack in popularity or stars and all that it needs is just a little chip here or a chisel there.

“The best thing I saw in Indian coaches is their eagerness to learn new things. Almost all of them come with good general education in coaching but they lack programmes which allow new information to flow into the system. Most foreign coaches get opportunity to brush their knowledge once a year at table tennis workshops or clinics. I believe this is the first time Indian TT coaches have had a chance similar to that,” said McAfee on the ITTF/PTT Level One course.

McAfee, who is widely travelled, was all praise for the facilities available in the country. “Indian coaches have exposure to lot more facilities than many other countries and my goal is to make them utilise these facilities to reap more results.”

“I am not looking at the national team, my job is simple, just to develop the local coaches and bring in change. The top-level players are like finished products, you can only prepare them for a competition by slightly modifying their game. But if you have technically strong coaches at the beginners’ level then the players coming out of that pipeline will make the whole team much stronger and that is my mission.”

“China, the best in the world, took their best coaches in the country and put them not with the national team but with the starters, because they wanted to give their players a perfect beginning. According to them, a top player does not need a good teacher just needs someone who can guide him through his match practice.”

This Chinese philosophy may not be adaptable in all the countries and that is where McAfee’s coaching the coaches mission gains importance.