COACHING IS FOREVER

By zaharibb

Performance is temporary coaching is forever. That was a final note by one

speakers at a coaching education conference in Hong Kong that I attended in
2007. As a rule of nature we all know that nothing will always be excellent or top
form all the time. A Malay saying that life is like a cart wheel; at time it is on top
while at other time at the bottom. That situation also applies to athletes in sports.
When he/she performs well in one meet he/she might mot do well in another.
Datuk Lee Chong Wei played well in the Beijing Olympics and won a silver but in
the next tournament that he played, his performance was not as good.

In the eye of spectators or most sports fan, there is no such thing as defeat or
losing. They will always want their team or player win on every occasion which
naturally will not happen. No athlete can ever maintain his performance from one
competition to another and with increasing age and deterioration in physical
strength he or she will experience a decline in his/her performance. What goes
up will come down and what lies at the bottom might one day go up. A winning
team will not always be on the winning end and a losing team might one day turn
into champions. That’s what performance is. Its just temporary.

On the other hand coaching has no end. Whether or not his/her athlete perform,
the coach’s job has to go on. Win or loose, coaching has to be carried out. There
is no end for coaching. Hence performance is temporary but coaching is forever.

Since coaching is forever, a coach duty is to move on. He must not rest on his
laurel and be satisfied with what he has. He has to improve himself on every
areas of coaching especially when high performance competition is very
demanding and challenging. It is not a matter of the strong will win anymore.

Advances and development technology and sports engineering, the challenges is

thus pushed to a greater height every time. The IAAF motto, Altius, Citius,
Fortius shows that in the area of track and field athletes were always trying to
improve speed, distance and height. Using of equipment and facilities create
advances in performance but how far do our Malaysian coaches on today
capture the essence of sports technology to improve performance of their
athletes.

From my perception there are two types of coaches who are actively coaching in
the country. First the traditional coach who coaches with knowledge he/she
inherits from his/her coach or physical education teacher (I was one of them until
I received my formal coaching education) or from watching other people doing it
and secondly the “educated” coaches who posses formal knowledge in coaching,
has academic and sports science ingredient, in short with paper qualification. I
am not going to differentiate and degrade those who are traditional in nature
because we have no ground to commit and say (as far as Malaysia is concerned)
that they do not produce high performance athlete, since they had proven that
they did.

What I am going to stress in this writing is that sports whether new or traditional,
needs a modern coaching approach. Coaching is dynamic and an ongoing
process and just as science, it always changes with time. As a coach he/she
needs new input in terms of coaching approach, new ways and tactics of
defeating or to overcome opponents in the arena. So coaches should grab all
opportunities available when Malaysia puts sports as one of the main component
of national development.

One of the rational of the National Sports Policy, that sports is one of the
development program of Malaysia and with that sports development is being
given some form of priority. The set-up of the Cabinet Committee for Sports
Development comprising of 15 Ministers is an example of how important sports is
to the government, in Malaysia.

Developing coaches in Malaysia is quite a tough assignment. The National

Sports Council task to prepare athletes for the 1998 Commonwealth Games had
shown us that to recruit local coaches to carry out the task was quite tough. Local
coaches lacking experience to train athletes for high level competition can be
seen. It seems that locals are still not prepared to carry the burden. In order to
achieve the objectives, foreign coaches were hired which do raise some feeling
of jealousy from local coaches especially in perks the foreigner were getting.

During the preparation of athletes for the Commonwealth Games, Dr. Leonard de
Vries (now Datuk) did a research on the coaches involved in the preparation. His
findings showed that local coaches are on par with foreign coaches but the
difference is only in working culture. If local coaches were to change their
working culture, then they might be able to stand on the same playing field with
foreign coaches at least domestically.

The task of educating local coaches especially in the area of Sports Science was
given to National Sports Council after a Coaching Symposium organized by the
Council in Kuala Lumpur on 14th January 1995. That resulted in the formation of
the National Coaching Board (NCB) and the Coaching Unit at NSC. The
coaching unit at NSC initially act as the secretariat for NCB that is only a working
committee without any executive powers. The role of the NCB is to advise the
government in the area of coaching education

The National Sports Council runs the National Coaching Accreditation Scheme
and has been in the picture since 1986. The scheme has three levels comprising
of three components. First is the Sports Science that is being conducted by NSC.
The second component is the Sports Specific and Practicum being run by the
respective National Sports Association, A coach has to complete and pass all
the three components to be accredited as a coach at a particular level i.e. Level I
coach, Level II coach or Level III coach.