Thumm looking for young Indonesian talents

Thumm looking for young Indonesian talents

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