I was recently reading through an article in sportskeeda where the author mentioned that some athletes were auditioning to get selected for some sport team ( i think he said athletics). This is something that i’d say is the death knell of sports in India which sadly happens in every district in India.
While this is a good idea for athletics, where selecting the fastest sprinter, or the longest jumper makes sense, the same approach is carried over to other sports. This is how a district football team in Tamil Nadu is selected back when i was in school.
Team Selection
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Our school PT master was the manager for the district football team. So he got 4 members of the sixteen member squad that he could pick, no questions asked. The rest were left to the mercy of the coach, who was a Govt school Pt master, and picked 4 of his school patrons and the rest 8 were selected through try outs. I say Try outs but it was more of an Audition. They all showed up, on a specified day. did some drills, nothing with a football, just sprinting, stamina and jumps. and selected on the basis of their performance and height.
He would later reason that taller people can reach the ball faster, and were useful for heading the ball in. Being Tall or fast isn’t particularly useful in football if you don’t have the skill to back it up. I am ashamed to say that our team, picked this way, did reasonably well in the tournament. We lost in the quater-finals of the tournament, thus becoming one of the top eight teams of all the districts of Tamil Nadu. Some of us did even get selected to play for the state, based on our performance in the tournament.
It is a testament to bad selection process that our team did so well. Every other team was selected in a similar manner, and this is exactly why we don’t produce nearly as many quality athletes as a nation with our population should. Many athletes are sidelined because of height or social stigma and never make it into district teams because 5 people can run 100 meters faster than him. Skill is not even a consideration . The 4 people picked by our coach (from his school) were in my opinion the best members of our team. but that is not saying much is it?
I have long since maintained that Sport has to grow at a grass root level for India to become a sporting giant. I hope that one day, in the not so far in the future, we will be counting our olympic gold medals in three digits instead of one.
