THE COACH WHO WASN'T A COACH

Even today I feel like THE BLUE JACKAL who acted like the king of the forest. I was never trained to be a coach but I became a coach. The club loved me because I brought huge crowds of children into the stadium. The barren look most of the stadiums have is because SPORTS is supposed to be very tough - and the look most sportsmen support on their faces is nothing to crow about. IT IS VERY VERY SERIOUS. So children tend to stay away from BIG STADIUMS. I changed all that. My children could run 10 rounds or even 20 rounds around the stadium - and so could other new-comers; because there were always innovation in my `warm ups'. WE CLIMBED HILLS for warm up during week-ends. There were very few hills, we didn't climb up. I was known as the man WHO TOOK CHILDREN FOR TREKKING. I didn't mind. I was building their minds and bodies.

Our girls' team was beaten with 32-0 score and the boys team did little better by losing with 28-0. Later, they told us that the other team had FOUR state players playing for them. For a week, I stopped going to the stadium - I was so frustrated.
FUN WAS OK - matches couldn't be won with smiles on our faces. After a week, I came back to the basketball court fully prepared. For one week, I searched in the Library for BASKETBALL COACHING MANUALS. I learnt `man-to-man' marking versus zone defence. I must have read more than twenty books - I even read YMCA's rules of sports and games. I WAS TRAINING MYSELF TO BE A COACH.

Then we got another call from the same team - THEY WERE ASKING - WANT ANOTHER THRASHING? We asked them for two more weeks. They agreed. I do not know what happened in the next fifteen days. I started playing with them - and as I played, I found my three pointers going in - my hook shots started going in and I hardly ever missed my free throws. AND THE KIDS STARTED COPYING ME. Never again I was going to coach again - the best way to coach, I found, was to be in the court - playing with them. They will pick up the `skills' subliminally and it would indeed be SELF LEARNING. I was the best defensive player during my university days - I exactly knew how to steal the ball; and as I went back to my `basket balling days' my children learnt to copy - and to my amazement, some developed little variables on my style. Our confidence grew leaps and bounds. We lost our second match with this team but the scores told the story. Boys 46-32 - Girls 34 - 29!

PART III - Later