Nepali badminton has improved a lot: Nashid

Nepal hosted two back-to-back international badminton tournaments — SA U-21 Championship and Yonex Sunrise Nepal International Series. Council Member of Badminton World Federation and Development Committee Chairman of Badminton Asia Moosa Nashid was here to assess the junior players and technical manpower. Mahesh Acharya of The Himalayan Times had a tête-à-tête with Nashid, also President of Maldives Badminton Association. Excerpts:

What is the purpose of your visit?

Well our development goes mostly focused on developing countries. Nepal also happens to be in the development rank of our 24 member countries falling in South Asia.

So it’s our foremost responsibility as the governing body of badminton in Asia and specially chairman of the Development Committee of Badminton World Federation to go and see how our members are performing, and how our members are delivering as far as development activities are concerned.

After watching the U-21 event, how did u find the standard of Nepali players?

That’s the question I would like to answer with the pride. I have seen Nepal badminton as a player, as a technical officer, and as a coach at different levels. Compared to the days of late 90s, the game has been improved on positive manner.

There are so many finals where Nepali players are competing. And not only competing in that level, they have also captured the championship in different international tournaments. Likewise, competing with India and Sri Lanka was a challenge then. But now they want to take over and get the trophy or medal for themselves. So I don’t think they consider themselves as anything below a champion.

What do you think is lacking in Nepali badminton?

To be honest, it’s a very holistic approach they have made. For me what I have seen and our team definitely work on would be to give them more exposure in terms of having the opportunity to spend with other top players because they have a complete structure. Our expectation was work on different strategies on their mind sets, when they are tired how to overcome and compete with other good players which means completely the mind sets and giving them exposure to fight and work along with different players.

What is the role of technical manpower in the development process?

It is very vital. I think we have brought few good coaches here to upgrade to the next level as well. So BWF has different levels, where the local coaches will be competing to reach top by climbing the ladder up. At the same time, we are working to produce more coaches through the project — Shuttle Time, which again Nepal is doing very good. As I mentioned earlier, the leadership here is fantastic. They are very prominent, they are producing results, not only players, governance and technical officers and coaches.

What would you suggest NBA for future projects?

For me, what is very important is to make close communication with Badminton Asia. Likewise it is very important for NBA to have a broader spectrum and also the people from different committees working with it to be more active. To my information, few committees are active but they need to enhance different committees like technical committee, coaches committee and paralympic is also getting bigger and bigger. Women in badminton are also equally important components to sustain and we need to have more women in badminton as coaches, players and technical officers. Not only the part of NBA, as a whole we need more active women in order to have right synchronisation and right sort of commitment.

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