THE SMELL OF BADMINTON

Yesterday We have been to the training in Lap Vo again, it is a club that we go to every time we are in Vietnam and it always makes me wonder how it is possible that our sport is doing so well in this country.  The hall is really shit, it is an old building with 3 courts without any space between de double lines and the wall, when it is raining it also rains in the hall. But this hall is filled with players, yesterday I did training on one of the courts with 11 players all at one time.

On court two 8 players where taking turns to play double and on the last court (you can not really call this a court) where the U7, U9 and U11 players 12 in total. So we are talking about 31 players on 3 courts, I did the U15 and U17 the Vietnam coach the small kids and one ass coach did the doubles games. The group I did is a group any club in Europe would be proud of to have has there junior selection, with a couple of very talented girls and boys. 

The whole group started of with a footwork warming up by themself in charge was a 13 year old girl, some of the stuff was a little outdated but in general it was a nice warming up, and it was very disciplined. Even the U7 did the whole warming up (20 min) without distraction, after warming up we started to do the training, it is not everyday I have 11 players on one court so it needed some improvising. The theme was technical stroke training because this is something that is not done a lot in Vietnam, everything is hard smashes and power play. We did finger power, strokes without backswing, double motions before hitting the shuttle, with and against the hand strokes and deceptions. None of the players speaks English so it was body language and two times a short translation from Huynh, it is so great to see the interest of this players in the details of what the function of every finger is in a stroke where you don’t use power at all.

All 11 players where active the whole training of 1 hour and we end the training with deception multi shuttle feeding so they could feel what a deception is doing to your body, your physical performance and to show them how important it is to work on correction steps to recover falling into a deception. The thing that made me wonder is how do you get kids motivated to come with so many to a shit hall to play on a court with up to 12 players where we in Europe have max 4 on a court. It is the social factor, the coach has created a group of young kids that like to be together. It is something that is very recognizable for me because this was also the fact when I started playing in VELO in Kwintsheul Holland, a very big group of friends who just loved to be together all the time. You will say well times have changed and kids have Iphones now and don’t talk or play together anymore and Vietnam is a poor country so they don’t have this problem. WRONG also in Vietnam the 3 most important things for kids to stay alive are 1. Drinks, 2 food and 3 the Iphone, but there is a very inspiring coach who makes everybody feel special talent or not. This is the success of Lap Vo Badminton, and not a great hall or a coach that know a lot about badminton. I love to come to places like this and when I bring players from Europe to this place they say “it is dirty and it smells” And I say YES you are right this is the smell off  great badminton.