Working with the Local Organising Committee, the Asian Paralympic Committee (APC) held a workshop for coaches, manager, classifiers and athletes on the sidelines of the 6th Fazza Para Archery World Ranking Tournament that concluded in Dubai recently.
The workshop, which was led by Ms. Carole Hicks, former head of Para Archery Committee at World Archery and Technical Advisor for the LOC, had participants from eight countries out of the 10 Asian nations who took part at the Championships. The main objective of the workshop was to guide the participants from the National Paralympic Committees (NPCs) with establishing the right structure to train more coaches and classifiers in their respective countries, which will also grow the sport in the Asian region.
The participating nations were: Malaysia, Singapore, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Japan and Sri Lanka.
Ms. Hicks was delighted to see the interest from the Asian nations and hopes that this will only increase in the future.
“The workshop was more about guiding the participants with the structure needed to coach people, to have judges and classifiers in order to have a fair competition in their countries. How things should go forward and how they can make them work.”
The former World Archery official also highlighted the responsibility of the National Associations, Continental Associations and World Archery to provide training to increase the number of coaches and classifiers.
‘Support for Para Archery in Asia from APC is superb’
She highlighted APC’s support and contribution towards Para Archery over the years.
“The work done in Asia by Asian Paralympic Committee has been amazing. They have supported a number of courses that train coaches, classifiers and athletes. With Cambodia being a poorer country with not much training facility, APC put together a package of Archery equipment to send off to Cambodia which would have been a lot of money. So, the support for Para Archery in Asia from APC is superb and that was acknowledged by everybody here,” said Ms. Hicks.
She felt that these workshops are useful for smaller countries like Cambodia, Laos and Bhutan etc. where they are still trying to have an organized structure in Para Archery. “Among the countries present here – Japan, Kazakhstan, even Malaysia are quite organized, while many others are still in development.”
‘Productive session’
One of the participants, Japan’s coach Nobutomo Takeuchi who was accompanied by two other coaches at the workshop said: “It was a very productive session. We got to know many tools and ways of training coaches and classifiers. Right now, we have just three national classifiers because of language barrier.
“We have to work harder to make the Japan Archery Abled Body Association and Para Association to work together. Out of the eight countries attending the workshop, only two countries – Malaysia and Kazakhstan – have United association.”
Another participant from Malaysia, Marzuki who is also a coach praised the support of APC in organising such workshops and said the opinions and experiences shared by various nations at the programme were very interesting and productive. “There should be more workshops like this one in future.”
Last year, APC in association with World Archery held a five-day Coaches and Classifiers Training Course, which was attended by 25 nations.