It’s been one month since Cheah Soon Kit returned to Badminton Association of Malaysia and it appears that he’s spotted a key factor behind the deteriorating performance of the junior squad.
According to the men’s doubles coach, the members of the junior squad are severaly lacking mental strength as well as physical fitness – something that he’ll be working on in the next few months.
“After a month of being here, I see that some players need to be more consistent in terms of playing and for that they need improve their mental strength,” said Soon Kit as quoted from Utusan.
“I have left the national squad for a long time, therefore I need to make a training module and use sports science to help the players.”
“My mission is simple, which is to enter the Olympics. The 2020 Olympics will be my main focus.”
Soon Kit also stated that the mentality of the juniors is also a worrying factor. They are not ambitious enough as they don’t strive for more during major championships.
“They are still young, so they don’t know what they want and as a coach we need to play ourrole to prepare them mentally for any major tournaments.”
“It’s different from my time as a player. We had a 1988 project which was a mission to win the Thomas Cup. All players had help from a psychologist in order to strengthen our mentality and we hope to do the same for all the other players.”
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