SL Athletics requests a mechanism to introduce promising athletes to top coaches

Sri Lanka Athletics has requested the intervention of the National High Performance Sports Committee to help set up a system to get talented athletes trained under the supervision of qualified high performance coaches. In this file picture junior athletes are seen competing in the 100 metres at a junior event at the Sugathadasa Stadium. (File pic by Kamal Wanniarachchi)

by Reemus Fernando

Apart from developing infrastructure and training facilities, the Sri Lanka Athletics has highlighted at a meeting with Tier 1 of National High Performance Sports Committee inclusive of Julian Bolling and Sports Council head Mahela Jayawardena on Monday the need to set up a mechanism for talented athletes identified at grass root level to reach high performance coaches.

“One of the reasons for lack of medals at international level after the mid 2000s was promising athletes not being trained by qualified coaches. During the 90s and the early 2000s the country won medals at International level including the Olympics, Asian Games and Commonwealth Games. During that time the cream of country’s top athletes were trained by qualified coaches. But after that golden period many promising athletes who were identified at school level continued to remain with their school coaches. We highlighted this as one of the reasons for lack of medals at international level and we requested the intervention of the National High Performance Sports Committee to help set up a system to get talented athletes trained under the supervision of qualified high performance coaches,” Saman Kumara Gunawardhana, the statistician of Sri Lanka Athletics said.

Stating that the meeting with the National High Performance Sports Committee was fruitful the official said: “We highlighted the need to develop infrastructure, need to obtain expertise of foreign coaches and a system to get talented athletes to train under qualified coaches. There was a system during the 90s where the PTIs and the Sports Officers identified the talent at grass root level and introduced those athletes to top national coaches. It resulted in athletes winning at international level. Lately the coaches at grass root level were reluctant to introduce their athletes to top coaches. There was a time when top coaches like Derwin Perera and Sunil Gunawardena did not have up and coming athletes coming to them.”

“We tried to address the problem by introducing a rewards system for coaches at grass root level. But still there are coaches who are reluctant to introduce their athletes to top coaches,” he said.

As highlighted by Sri Lanka Athletics there is a genuine need to introduce such a system but there are many other reasons for the dearth of medals during the last one and half decades at international level in track and field sports.

Sri Lanka Athletics provided a list of athletes who have been among the top 20 performers in Asia in 2019 to the National High Performance Sports Committee and had stressed the need to have the synthetic track relayed at the Mahinda Rajapaksa International Stadium, Diyagama and increasing the office space of Sri Lanka Athletics headquarters at Torrington for which the Committee had responded positively.