Ivana calls for focused talent scouting
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."