Ivana calls for focused talent scouting
Moch. N. Kurniawan, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta
Find them young.
That is the message of former top badminton player Ivana Lie, who believes the Badminton Association of Indonesia (PBSI) needs to start scouring elementary school playgrounds for a potential women's champion.
"At present, we lack talented shuttlers in the women's division as young girls may not be interested in playing badminton and prefer to do other things," said Ivana, who introduced a scaled down version of the sport for juniors in January.
"The situation is exacerbated because clubs don't have uniform coaching standards."
The association has traditionally relied on the club system to hone the talents of players, but there has been little to cheer about among the women's players since the retirement of Susy Susanti in 1998.
In the 1960s, the country boasted Minarni and Retno Kustiyah, followed by Verawaty Fadjrin, Ivana and Imelda Wiguna in the 1970s and '80s. Susy took all the world's major titles in the 1990s, including Olympic gold in 1992, but no woman has taken up her mantle since Mia Audina moved to the Netherlands in 1999.
At the end of 2004, not one Indonesian woman was ranked in the world's top 20.
Ivana, the 1980 World Championship runner-up and a former women's coach at the national training center, said some players recruited to the center still displayed elementary technical deficiencies, including misholding the racket, stemming back to their club days.
"Such a basic mistake takes a long time to be corrected."
Ivana advised PBSI to use sports teachers at schools as its "eyes" to identify physically gifted girls.
"We can begin by measuring the girls' ability, such as through speed, strength, their posture and growth, because badminton basically requires all of those things. Through such a method, sports teachers could recommend PBSI approach the students to train as shuttlers."
Most Indonesian women's players today stand around 160 cms, compared to the relative giants of China and Korea, many of whom are above average height. For instance, China's Zhang Ning is 175 cm, while Korean Ra Kyung-min is 178 cm.
The reliance on clubs to find new talent was flawed, she added, because parents brought their children to train there on their own initiative.
"Therefore, if girls are reluctant to play badminton, the (pool of) new talent will be limited," Ivana said.
"Worse still, I don't see any new talented girl shuttlers between the ages of 14 and 18, so we cannot expect much from our women's squad."
Coaching techniques at the club level must also be standardized, she added.
"If we have a coaching standard, we will be able to see relatively similar type of shots and footwork from players."
She is not the only former player concerned about the future of the women's game.
Tan Joe Hok, the first Indonesian to win the All England championship, said the going would be even tougher if prize money in the sport was ever brought on par with tennis.
The winner's purse for the women's singles at the Korea, Indonesia and China Opens, as well as the new China Masters, the sport's richest events on the 2005 calendar, is US$17,250 -- about half of what a second-round loser gets at a tennis Grand Slam.
"If the money went up, you'd have all the Russians, Czech women going into the sport. Indonesia could forget about it."