On the need of more coaches…
I started a coaches education course to develop coaches at district level. This is very important because every district needs at least five to six coaches who can just attract children to athletics. Who can scout and train. We will require say in about 700 districts about 3500-4000 coaches.
We call it a pre Level 1 AFI coaching that is totally online, six days. Anyone can participate. There is no prerequisite qualification required. Anyone interested in coaching, whether it is a parent or a veteran athlete or a physical education teacher, for anyone who is passionate about coaching. That we started in 2020 during Covid year. Response was very good. As of now, we have produced more than three thousand coaches but we need more.
On how coaching has changed over the years
The biggest problem earlier was over training and early specialisation. Even now it is prevalent but we are trying to reduce as much as possible. You must have seen so many champions in U20 and U18, but they have not graduated to the senior level the way they should have. We had conducted a survey and research on this. We found 130 youth medallists were there from in the World Youth Championship and Asian Youth Championship but out of that you can find only Neeraj Chopra and Dutee Chand graduate to the senior level with the same performance. It is a very low percentage.
The biggest challenge was to stop this early specialization and overtraining. That was only a little bit of success. I don’t say it is fully successful, but it is being done and reflects in nationals results. Early specialization has been a menace too, especially in states like Kerala where athletics is very popular. As they grow older, either they are getting injured or they are burnt out. It is like when a child grows no one trains them to crawl and stand. They do it when they are ready. Coaching is like that. So as a coach you should make sure that athletes are able to do that type of training. I had been to the US for a high-level coaching programme where I met an NCAA coach. He was training 26 athletes and I was surprised. I asked him how it was possible. He said ‘I start working from seven to twelve, then again, and from three to seven and I am not allowed to train an athlete more than 12 hours a week’.
Means twelve hours in a week for children at 18. Whereas, in our system, coaches will ask athletes to train 24 hours a week — two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening for six days. If you just look into the results of all world class athletes, they have performed their best at the age of 25-26 including the likes of Usain Bolt. It is said that 10,000 hours of core training makes an athlete reach their full potential. What our coaches do is that they finish that 10,000 hours by the age of eighteen.