MHF Committees in "Slumberland" - Part 1: "Directionless" Coaching Committee

MHF shall be having their AGM today and dutifully all the Committees shall be presenting their annual report. Many may get a way with it as the Affiliates may not know what to ask the Committees to account for their 1 year activities. An area that may get great focus would probably be the Coaching Committee, the Development Committee and the Medical Committee. For this article i shall confine myself to the Coaching Committee.


Coaching because it has been riddled with enough controversies from the previous MHF administration. The "hue and cry" continues into the current administration as part of an exercise referred to as "pay back" time. Many who were involved in the running of Coaching Committee previously are now in the position of being members and are giving back what they got previously. Indeed the coaches close to the previous administration have been left in the "lurch" and this has annoyed them even more. Effectively there are cliques in the Coaching Committee that make good decisions difficult to come by.


Indeed the Coaching Committee Chairman has acted strangely including not following the MHF constitution in the appointment of the initial Coaching Committee Secretary. He was not spared the devastating verbal attacks from a particular group within the Committee. Indeed he tended his resignation and subsequently withdrew it. The Chairman has been literally bullied by certain key officials in MHF particularly by the Team Management Committee when they named all the coaches for the various national high performance teams without discussing it with the Coaching Chairman.


The Coaching Committee is scarred badly that its creditability is severely dented. They have even failed to issue certificates for coaching courses completed some 8 months ago. This is the state of affairs and peculiarly if you do ask for the certificates from the Coaching Committee, they tend to point the fingers to the Secretary of MHF. If you ask the Secretary of MHF, he points it back to the Coaching Committee. End of the day these 2 people have a good laugh but the poor coaches are still without the certificates. Even a simple act like that is so time consuming.

Therefore you can see that they do not have a clue of what to do. They are doing nothing seriously, not even trying to get our coaches to FIH courses. A year has gone by and the Coaching Committee is still in its bickering mode. It would seem difficult to get anything done.

Latest of the fiasco is for the Coaching Committee to release the national coaches and their assistants to become coaches or consultants for the MHL teams. The only exception seem to be the Chief National Coach. These are full time coaches with MHF and if they are not training any of the national teams, then they must be busy spotting talents or helping in development or running courses for novice coaches. The problem here is the coaches want more money and such the Coaching Committee allows them to indulge. Question is what ever happens to their full time job for which they are being paid?

In all fairness, MHF must stop this silly clearance that the Coaching Committee has given or not at least deduct their full time salaries if they want to participate in the MHL by granting them "no paid leave".. What i cannot understand is if everyone else can take part why then create an exception for the Chief Coach. Might as well everyone enjoy earning more money at the expense of their full time job. After all it is taxpayers money!!!!!

More importantly why should the National Coaches have a monopoly. They are already promoted therefore give the other budding coaches a chance to be exposed. Where else can they get a chance to work in an environment that MHL creates. If any, the national coaches are not only greedy but are equally selfish. All this happens because of the lack of foresight in the Coaching Committee and its Chairman. Strangely these are the guys who are going to create the coaches to train our generation of hockey players. I seriously think MHF need to look at this carefully if they want there to be "hope" for the future of Malaysian hockey.