David John, High Performance Director for ODISHA Hockey tells us why its important to improve the school’s sports system and Odisha’s preparation for the KIYG 2023.

by Sportspreps | Jan 12,2023

Delhi, 12 January 2023: David John has been in India for a very long time. He was working with team India since 2016 before resigning in 2020 as the High Performance Director and joining Odisha Hockey in the same role in 2022.

As the Director of Hockey, he is responsible for recruiting the coaches and the supporting staff who train players, and also selecting the junior & sub-junior teams for various hockey tournaments. He is always on the lookout for new talent in other states to bring them to Odisha. He says it helps to watch other teams play to gain knowledge of other teams before we play them in the KIYG. David John is responsible for developing hockey culture of Odisha state. He has followed all past KIYG but only last year he was representing a team where Odisha Girls finished clinched a Silver Medal and Odisha boys won a Bronze.

Last year has been great for hockey with many grassroot level tournaments  happening on ground including the veteran Nehru Cup after a hiatus of 2 years, due to covid.

Speaking about the school sports culture in India, David says every other country has a school system. Where hockey is played in school, it can become a pathway for students to join clubs or academies and India at this time hasn’t had that structure in place. Next year Odisha will have a club and school competition for development of players at young age. Players not getting to play matches every week is the major problem throughout India. We do a lot of practice but we don’t play a lot of matches.

So this school and club system will allow us to play many more matches, which teaches a player how to really play hockey under pressure situations. Giving example of Australia where he is from, he says we have kids playing hockey at the tender age of 5 years, whereas in India it only happens when they reach age of 10 or 11. If a child start playing hockey much earlier then we’ll have players in Junior tournaments who have played hockey for a decade.

Coming back to KIYG 2023. The 5th edition of KIYG is having a qualification stage first time in the games history to not have many weak teams compete against stronger teams to have one sided  matches. The current edition of KIYG  will be held in Madhya Pradesh in 8 cities and will see participation by over 10,000 athletes in 17 sports from 36 states.