The Tribune: Juniors not a priority for Hockey India

Inadequate support staff and lack of exposure trips may hamper colts’ development and transition

By Indervir Grewal
Tribune News Service
Shilaroo, September 10

There’s a still in the air and a quiet around the valley. On the green turf, the boys slowly walk back to their positions, discussing what went wrong the last time. As Harendra Singh blows the whistle, the scene suddenly gets hectic. The ball, at the centre-line, moves from the right to the left and reaches Varun Kumar.

The 20-year-old takes a couple of steps down the side line, then shimmies to the right and pulls away from his marker. Amidst all the bustle of the players running around him, he takes a moment, briefly looks up and slaps the ball through the middle to the unmarked forward in the circle. “That’s it,” Harendra shouts out before blowing the whistle again to indicate that the drill is over.

Harendra is bound to get excited; he’s the coach. But, in general, there is a greater level of excitement and joy derived from watching juniors play and succeed then from watching seniors. Maybe, it’s because each display of technical or tactical brilliance from the juniors evokes hope for a better future for Indian hockey.

But hope is quickly followed by the usual misgiving — like so many in the past, would this talent and potential also be wasted because of the administrators’ neglect.

Proper development

A look at the list of the support staff with the junior team reinforces that doubt. Apart from Harendra, there are two other coaches, a physiotherapist, a mental trainer and a video analyst. But there is no physical trainer.
The team is undergoing a month-long high-altitude training camp at the SAI Centre in Shilaroo, about 50km north of Shimla. It’s the first ever high-altitude camp for the junior team but there is no physical trainer.

Hockey India (HI) hasn’t appointed separate physical trainers for the senior and junior teams. Australian Matthew Eyles works with both the teams.

Has he not been at the camp once? “No,” says Harendra. “We work from the notes that Matt sends.”
The camp, which started on August 9, is nearing its end. Despite the fact that the senior national camp only started on September 5, Hockey India didn’t send Eyles to the all-important camp.

It is baffling, considering that players need more attention at the developing stage.

“It is very important to give proper attention at the junior level,” says Jaspreet Jassi, physical trainer at the Surjit Hockey Academy, Jalandhar. “Because every player develops differently — some take longer than others — you need to give individual attention. And you need to keep testing the players on a more regular basis at the junior level; checking their progress to see if it’s time to increase the load,” adds the former national-level athlete, who has been with the academy for over eight years.

Harendra says he has asked HI for a separate physical trainer for the junior team. To add to it, the video analyst has been sitting useless at the camp. He didn’t bring the proper software, because of which there haven’t been any video sessions to study the progress of the boys.

Despite repeated tries, HI president Narinder Batra or sectretary Md. Mushtaque Ahmad couldn’t be contacted.

Lack of exposure

The team’s next big assignment is next month’s Sultan of Johor Cup, where it will defend the title for the second year in a row, followed by the Junior Asia Cup in November.

The camp ends on September 11 and after a week’s break the team will move to Delhi for the final camp before the tournament. Despite all the training, Harendra feels the team is short on match practice. They last played an international match in July at the Volvo International tournament in the Netherlands. In fact that’s the only tournament they have played this year.

The case has been the same in the previous years. Last year, they played in the Sultan of Johor Cup and went to Australia in December for a Test series.

The junior team plays around 10 international matches on an average in a year. On an average, a player should have played about 70 matches before he reaches the senior level. “We need more tours like the one to Australia. We played seven matches against Australia, New Zealand and Japan. It was great experience for the boys,” says Harendra.
“We’ll be in Delhi along with the senior team. I have asked HI to get us more matches with the senior team whenever the two teams train at the same venue,” he adds.

Transition

Making the transition from the junior to the senior level is probably the hardest step in the life of a sportsperson. Without proper support, many of even the most talented athletes fail to bridge that gap. And this has been a big problem with Indian hockey.

Our junior teams have had better results than the senior teams in the recent past — the men won the World Cup in 2001, the women finished third in 2013 World Cup and now the two consecutive wins at the Sultan of Johor Cup. But that success has rarely been transferred to the senior level.

The first major reason has been the inclusion of overage players at the junior levels. “When the overage players graduate to the senior level, they are already past the peak and they play for a couple of years only,” says Harendra. Few months ago, HI excluded 17 boys from the national camp, most of them were overage. “Because of the overage players, many of the talented youngsters lose out because they just can’t compete with the older guys,” Harendra adds.

The second reason is the lack of proper support to the junior teams — an extensive support staff and a well-planned schedule are two of the main factors. In fact, as all of the foreign coaches repeatedly emphasised on, it is time for HI and SAI to start making changes from the grass-roots level; there has to be a proper structure — which includes modern coaching throughout the country, better tournament structure, better selection process etc.

Out of the 17 players that were excluded, 10 had made the cut for the current camp. The coaching staff is having a tough time trying to finding proper replacements for those players — it’s very discouraging that in country of a billion-plus people, the coaches of a national team can’t find replacements for 10 players.