Appointing unsuitable coach a grave setback to netball
Singapore has been doing extremely well at international netball competitions. In 2012 they won the Asian Senior Netball Championships. They repeated the performance in 2014 and they have all the capabilities of winning the 2016 contest as well in the tournament to be held Thailand from July 30 to August 7. Accordingly they will bag the 2016 championships as well and Sri Lanka apparently is doing nothing to stop their victory bid. This was stated by Lourdes Jayasekera, a former Sri Lanka national coach, now residing in Las Vegas, USA to the Sunday Times via the telephone.
Lourdes Jayasekera
Continuing Lourdes said, “There is only another five or six month to the competition. To date they have not appointed a national coach or an assistant. At this rate we will never be able to defeat Singapore. Sri Lankan netball officials are not concerned about the competition. It is quite apparent they are working to safeguard their positions and to hold onto their positions. “It is also quite clear that they will appoint another person who is not suited to be the netball coach. It looks as if they are working on keeping out reliable coaches who had shown their capabilities and are dead keen keep them out.
They are trying to rope in coaches who have not shown their colours to this position. This coach was ousted in 2014 as she was not suited for the post. “In the 2015 World Cup in Sydney she was not able to give Sri Lanka a single victory. Sri Lanka lost all 16 games in the competition. Even Somitha De Alwis’s application has been rejected. Somitha had coached the Hatton National Bank (HNB) team with great success and then coached the Sri Lanka Navy team who bagged the national title for the first time beating all other teams in the competition held in Anuradhapura.
Even rejecting the application of an up-and-coming coach such as Somitha is a grave crime committed for Sri Lanka netball. Lourdes is a netball coach who coached the national team in 1990’s. In 1999 she coached the Sri Lanka team at the World Cup in Christchurch, New Zealand and prior to that coached the Sri Lanka teamto the Commonwealth Games 1998 in Malaysia. She had coached the HNB team giving the team a row of successes. She was also the president of the Mercantile Netball Association at that time and was also the secretary of the Sri Lanka Netball Federation in 1996.
Lourdes went on to say that she has no confidence on the present netball interview board that had selected the netball coach for the Asian Championships and added; “They have no experience at all on coaching aspects.” She went on to say that the normal practice is to appoint a coach and then select the pool but this procedure had not been followed. “At this rate even this time we will not be able to win the Asian Championships. Not only Singapore, even Malaysia will pose a big threat to Sri Lanka,” she assessed. “All this due to the greed for power.
The sport does not matter to them at all. It is the power that matters,” concluded Lourdes. According to the latest world rankings Sri Lanka is in 24th position and Asian defending champions Singapore are in 15th position. Third placed Malaysia are in the 18th spot. All this indicates that not only Singapore but Malaysia will also be a major threat to Sri Lanka. In the history of the Asian Netball Championships Sri Lanka has won on four occasions. They were in 1989 (Delhi), 1997 (Singapore), 2001 (Colombo) and 2009 (Malaysia).
In recent happenings the Minister of Sports Dayasiri Jayasekera had requested the Sri Lanka Netball Federation to interview Somitha De Alwis . This has been done after the Mercantile Netball Association had requested the Minister to see that Somitha is interviewed for the post. The Sri Lanka Netball Federation’s coach interview committee had interviewed four candidates and had selected Deepthi Alwis’s name and her name has been sent for the Sports Ministry for ratification.