Finally India is regaining its sports culture.
Let me rephrase again.
NZ has very high per capita medals ranking.
How they do it?
All schools have comprehensive sports curriculum and all games are given same sports venues used for national and international teams. Not to mention all games have proper coaches. Surprisingly parents who have played professional sports volunteer to be coaches. This keeps the sports in the family. It is common site to see siblings playing for same teams and coaches’ sons and daughters playing for the same teams. Anyhow no game is played without coach and a referee or umpire.
One day is Marathon day. Generally Wednesday and they all have to run certain KMs depending on age. It is common site during weekdays kids running around suburbs and half of them run bare footed (the towns are so clean and well paved. Higher the class more the KMs. If you are playing one game then after school one day is for training and one day for the match. Generally at Juniors level the matches are played on Saturday. I am not exaggerating whole country is out on sports venues to support their kids on Saturdays. Things also get loud and charged for which schools keep sending emails to parents to calm down
.
Talking about sports culture, no one stops playing sports even after school or getting into jobs etc. The venues are always booked for social games.
Now coming back to India and I can see from here that things are changing but at professional levels. Our problem is not having larger pool of ready to go players. The cricket and hockey has sorted this issue. Thanks to IPL like leagues. Same must be done in other sports.
The key to our medals is in Schools.
Catch them young+Infra+participation (elite school sports clubs+development teams and social teams; 3 levels of participation and no one is denied but firmly placed in a level which they deserve)+Honest selection+effort to build larger pools.
Some black pill on clueless politicians and their poor vision for the schools infrastructure is mandatory here. Slogans and tweets can not replace access to stadiums. To grow a a plant into big tree you need to increase the pot size slowly and periodically. You can not expect your players to become world champions by simply dropping them into stadium after few good performances. If you notice they all start hyperventilating and comes under pressure at closing down of their games. This means they do not have enough pressure tempering done on them when they were young.