National coach Gopi Chand advocates for “one calendar” to improve player development

Chief National coach P. Gopi Chand stated that there needed to be more incentives for the nation’s top players to participate in the Senior Nationals.

“It is always a challenge when athletes have to play two circuits, international and national, or national and state,” he said here on Sunday. “Time for off-season or a training block becomes very limited. Ideally, there should be one calendar, not two.

“A three-day Nationals, with the top-eight participating, could change things. But in some states, national participation gives you a job somewhere or a university seat. Aligning all these interests needs considerable debate”.

Gopi Chand felt that making it mandatory would not be fool-proof. “Players may just come, lose a match and walk off. That’s not the purpose. Either the prize money needs to be motivating or certain other things [have to be].

“It has to be across the board. If you are a junior national champion, what you get today is very debatable. Do you get to be part of the national squad? Do you get entries into every junior tournament that the country sends players to? That’s not happening. You still have to play selection trials. There are blurred lines everywhere”.

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Even as he praised India’s talent pool, the 51-year-old raised concerns about the nation’s coaching capacity.

“We’ve grown like Bangalore City, right? Very fast and then you are trying to figure out where the drainage has to go,” he said, eliciting many a smile. “How do you produce and motivate the next bunch of coaches? I could have said this six years back too, and that’s a big cause of concern because in this period we have not converted that talent into results.

“Coaches also need a level of comfort and safety. I had an All-England trophy; I had a Dronacharya [award] very early and enough family support. But for a young coach who is 25 or 30, this comfort is not there,” he added.

Gopi Chand, though, was happy to see P. Kashyap, Guru Sai Dutt et al. in coaching roles, adding to the pool that already contains the likes of Arvind Bhat and Anup Sridhar.

“If we give coaches a platform, and the freedom and responsibility to work, Indian badminton will figure itself out. Last year, we had Sai Praneeth go to the United States to coach. I don’t want that. We have big centres and enough students. We should give them [coaches] enough salaries to stay back.”