By Lily O. Ramos
MANILA, (PNA) — Sports coaches must be thoroughly knowledgeable of their particular event in order to be effective in teaching, imparting or downloading information, techniques, methods and winning strategies to their wards/athletes.
This is the gist of Philippine Sports Commission chair Ricardo “Richie”Garcia’s short talk with mediamen when he recently discovered that the Wrestling Association of the Philippines had installed coaches who are not qualified for the job.
Garcia said it is possible that not only WAP is guilty of fielding coaches/mentors who have no formal training or background on sports—whether regional or national in scope.
”Our national sports associations must be responsible in verification and certification of qualifications of their coaches or mentors. We want to help our NSAs as well as our athletes when they retire.
“It’s foolish to employ someone to teach wrestling when his technical or scientific sport is judo or karatedo,” said Garcia.
He added that there was a mental lapse on the part of the wrestling association leadership who should have thought of the consequence of their action before hiring handlers whose field of expertise is way off the sport.
Garcia revealed that the concept of employing regional coaches is the answer to the problem of giving job opportunities to retiring or retired athletes in strengthening the government’s sports grassroots program.
”Our focus is to give our retired athletes some source of living as regional coaches but I found out the concept is being twisted in a different way. I think this thing must be reviewed to put the right people to the right job,” said Garcia.
He said at present, there are 70 regional coaches divided into archery with four; judo (1); karatedo (7); rugby football (9); sailing (2); squash (1); table tennis (4); triathlon (6), weightlifting (12); and wrestling (15).