Thumm looking for young Indonesian talent

Hans Peter Thumm is helping Indonesia find and develop young sporting talent under what he calls a strategic and comprehensive talent identification process.

Thumm has been working in the country as a consultant under a cooperative Germany-Indonesia project for about one year.

Thumm's job is to develop a national strategy for systematic talent identification, which will be the basis for a long-term comprehensive strategy to eventually achieve greater success on the international level.

He said that for any such strategy to succeed, there needed to be major improvements in physical education at schools and clubs across country.

Based on his observations at schools over the past year, he concluded that due to the limited amount of sports facilities, children in Indonesian schools had very little opportunity to enhance their level of physical fitness, let alone their skill level in particular sports.

"It's very hard to believe that out of some 38 million primary and secondary school students across the country, not one has talent in to excel in sports. What a waste, that there has never been a real effort to find and develop them," the 58-year-old told The Jakarta Post during an interview.

Thumm, who has done similar projects in Nigeria, Malaysia and Namibia, said that he had prepared a plan he expected to translate into long-term success like he did in other countries, but with the one condition that he gets the full commitment of the government.

He said that while schools in rural areas had plenty of space, they were unable to make use of it because of a limited concept of physical education. And schools in urban areas mostly do not have the minimum requirement of space for sports fields, gymnasiums, pools, etc., and in some cases, the students had to use public streets or venues surrounded by traffic to play or exercise.

He was also amazed to find that teachers were such poor examples of health and fitness educators, by sticking to their smoking habit.

"Such coaches/teachers are unable to contribute to `character building' within a nation and should be replaced," Thumm said.

"As physical education (at schools) is the mother of sport, Indonesia, in the long-run, can only excel at the international level, when the quality of their P.E. programs at schools tremendously improve and are seriously promoted," said the Stuttgart native.

Thumm said, however, that most of the current physical education curricula had been simply copied from industrialized countries and therefore were not necessarily compatible here, due to the different socio-cultural factors and the general conditions between developing countries and industrialized ones.

Sports in primary school should emphasize fun for kids and not the pressure to produce results at an early age in order to satisfy the egos of some teachers, he said.

As only a maximum of three to five percent per class had the physical potential to fulfill the requirements of today's high performance sports, the schools must first concentrate on the general fitness of the other 95 percent and should make social learning through sports their real target, he said.

However, since physical education was now a non-exam subject, there is a lack of awareness by politicians, their parties, the public in general and parents in particular, he said.

According to Thumm, numerous researchers around the world have proven that the standard of high performance sports in a country correlates closely with the quality of the physical education programs in schools.

"That subject, however, is not sufficiently recognized as an essential part of `general education', for character and nation building, in the national education policy," he said, while adding that without a certain quality of physical education, the nation's sports programs would not get the necessary supply of future athletes.

"Leading individual sports like badminton, gymnastics and athletics are already short of junior-level stars," he added.

Moreover, Indonesia is also lacking an efficient system of talent identification, he said.

The German-Indonesian project, therefore, will establish within its strategy in talent identification at least one pilot project in Papua in close collaboration with local schools and the Athletic Association of Indonesia (PASI), while other provinces can follow after this example had been put successfully into place, he said.

Young Papuan talent will be identified in 10 locations across the vast territory -- in Jayapura, Sentani, Kirung, Biak Serui, Sorong, Merauke, Wamena, Puncak Jaya and Timika with an estimated 4,900 participants in the 13 to 14 age group. This number will be cut down to a maximum of 150 in six months, he said.

Papua has been chosen as the pilot project because the local government there stated its tremendous support for the strategy, and if the project succeeds in Papua, where people would need extra effort in traveling from one place to another, it would surely work in other provinces with better infrastructure, said Thumm.

According to Hendrik Barkeling, first secretary for public and cultural affairs at the German Embassy in Indonesia, the Papua project was originally a government-to-government project to develop a scheme for national systematic talent scouting, but it was delayed because Indonesia could not hold up their end.

"The delay was mainly due to the fact that because of budgetary restraints, the Indonesian partners were not in a position to provide the necessary resources as had been stipulated in the agreement between the two governments," he said.

He added that after several discussions between the two sides, there would be improvement in the future, as the Indonesian government had confirmed that the necessary funds were available for implementing the first step of the talent scouting scheme, which would take place in Papua.

Menase Weyai, head of the Papua Sports and Youth Affairs Agency, said that Papua had long been seen as top Indonesian athletic stable, but the local government was lacking the knowledge about how to identify them.

"With such a project we would learn how to `harvest' the athletes, at the same time educate the locals," he said. -- Zakki P. Hakim