Maybank-The Only Bank Left Participating In Malaysian Hockey League(MHL)

Maybank (yellow) in action in the  Malaysian Hockey League

Reminiscing to the '80s till the early '90s, when you are a state or a national hockey player, the bank's representatives will be at your doorsteps offering you employment.

At that time the Interbank hockey competition was considered a glamorous hockey tournament and most banks were competing with one another to get the best players to represent them.

In the early '80s, United Asian Bank (UAB) employed many national hockey players, and from the mid-'80s, Malayan Banking Berhad (Maybank) move aggressively to employ young budding national hockey players to beef up their team.

Maybank wants to be seen and heard as the "Number 1" team in the field of hockey; this is to maintain their status quo as the "Number 1" in the field of finance.

I can still vividly recall, most banks that participated in the interbank hockey competition during that time were Public Bank Berhad (PBB), Malayan Banking Berhad(MBB), United Asian Bank(UAB), Perwira Habib Bank(PHB), Bank Bumiputra Berhad(BBB), United Malayan Banking Corporation(UMBC) and Kwong Yik Bank(KYB).

Nearly all national hockey players were touted by these banks.

When the National Hockey League(NHL) was introduced in 1987s, most of the banks participated, as this competition was part of their preparation for the interbank hockey competition.

After the financial crisis hit Malaysia in 1997s, banks went through a period of restructuring, merger and acquisition exercises to fortify the financial sector.

Upon completion of these exercises, the number of banks participating in the interbank hockey competition and the NHL reduced drastically.

Then with the banking industry going through with another round of internal and external restructuring in the early and mid-2000s', the few banks that were participating in the NHL fizzle away.

Maybank being the bastion of the financial sector continued their participation in the NHL consistently.

Powered with many young and vibrant national hockey players, Maybank 
showed its prowess on the field by winning the league title in 1994 & 1995 and the overall title in 1990 & 1994.

Since then Maybank continued participating in NHL without any success.

Even with the NHL changing its name to the Malaysian Hockey League (MHL) didn't transform Maybank's fortune in the competition. 

These mediocre results had prompted Maybank's top brass to give their hockey team management carte blanche to hire the best hockey players in the country and also to secure renowned foreign players for the MHL.


With this strong support, Maybank's team management tried to recruit established junior and senior national hockey players by offering them employment opportunities with the bank, but only a handful took the offer as most players were enticed with the big bucks the other teams were offering.

For the foreign player's quota, Maybank was able to secure the service of the legendary midfielder Shakeel Abbasi, the speedy Muhammad Waqas and other notable Pakistani internationals for a few seasons to lead the Maybank team in the MHL.

All these actions too didn't work out to Maybank's favor in the MHL.

Some murmurs of Maybank will not be participating in the coming MHL are coming out from the hockey circle and I hope it's not true. 

I too was a Maybank hockey player and every time I see Maybank in action in the MHL reminds me of the great and beautiful years enjoying hockey with the Maybank team.

As the bastion of our financial sector, Maybank can create the best hockey players for their team and country with a Long Term Development Plan(LTDP) for hockey in place.

This LTDP can be part of Maybank's Corporate Social Responsibility program.

I hope to see the tiger roaring again in this coming Malaysian Hockey league with a vision and mission to lift Malaysian hockey to greater heights.
("Tiger" -synonymous with Maybank's logo)




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Youth Hockey Players-Basic Tactical Skills

Parents, coaches, journalists, and officials have been moaning and groaning on the quality of our youth hockey players in the ongoing Malaysian Junior Hockey League(MJHL).  

The future of our national hockey teams lies in this generation of youth hockey players.

I, for one, do not have any plans to beat a dead horse nor annoy my friends in the hockey fraternity.

I have watched a few games in the ongoing MJHL and what worries me most is these youth hockey players do not even understand the basic tactical skills of the game.

Basic tactical skills are also referred to as game intelligence, where the player needs to perform the right action at the right moment and the outcome is successful.

Coaches need to inculcate these youth hockey players with basic tactical skills from their specializing age 13+, and a tactical skills inventory list must be put in place to evaluate the player's improvement.

The results from this inventory list can guide the coach to lead the players to higher performance in training and games.

There are four key areas in the Tactical Skills Inventory List, as presented below:

• Positioning and deciding
• Knowing about ball actions
• Knowing about others
• Acting in Changing Situations

On each area, the coach must prepare a set of
questionnaires to evaluate these youth hockey players' understanding of the game.

The above four key areas cover all aspects of the tactical skills, that is attack vs defense or researchers called it "declarative versus procedural knowledge".

In other words "knowing what to do" refers to declarative knowledge and "doing it" refers to procedural knowledge.

When a hockey player has a proper understanding of the game then he is good at reading the game and making the right decisions.

The essence of a good hockey player is the ability to read, recognize and react (3R) during a game.

To have any success in developing youth hockey players that are good at reading the game, Malaysian Hockey Confederation(MHC) must groom coaches who can create new technical and tactical skills that will inspire these young hockey players to learn and master new skills in training.


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Happy Chinese New Year 2016 "Gong Xi Fa Cai"

To all my Chinese Readers,

May the New Year "2016" the year of the wise monkey, brings in your life everlasting
joy, hopes and strength that will lift you as high as the beautiful sky.

Wishing you a Happy and Prosperous Chinese New Year.

"Gong Xi Fa Cai"
                             

Higher Education System-The Way Forward For Malaysian Hockey

I have compiled key points from a survey done by the British Universities & Colleges on student-athlete representation at elite level i.e Olympic Games.

Official statics released by the British Universities & Colleges Sport (BUCS) website state that over the last 20 years (from Barcelona Games 1992 to London games 2012),61%  of Team GB were in fact ‘products’ of the higher education system.

During the London Olympic Games 2012, there were a number of sports that had a very strong student-athlete representation, such as modern pentathlon (100%), women’s water polo (100%), rowing (90%), field hockey (87.5%), athletics (79.5%) and swimming (54%).

The French synchronized swimmer valued the intellectual stimulation that her academic career afforded her, which helped her to break from the often-regimented training sessions in her sport. She explained how there were moments when it was difficult to keep up the level of concentration and commitment during the long training sessions, especially when she had to work through what seemed to her as endless mechanical repetitions until a sequence is perfected.

By having her academic degree to focus on outside her sport helped her to stay motivated and to sustain these challenging requirements inherent to her sport in the longer term.

The French athlete on the other hand discussed her reasoning from a more psychological angle as she genuinely believed that being in education and especially being under pressure academically helped her concentration levels during competition.

All of these athletes conceded that simply having more time does not necessarily lead to improved athletic performances; on the contrary as the two gymnasts found out, their decision impacted negatively on their sport as they started to ‘waste’ time and get distracted. Therefore, they decided to take up education once again.

My thoughts are as below:

The Way Forward for Malaysian hockey is to put in place a comprehensive development plan where hockey players will be a product of the Higher Education System.

Hockey is a fast and invasive sport where you have to make decisions in a crouching position.

Tenaga Nasional Berhad(TNB) can pave the path for Malaysian hockey as they have a University in its helm i.e University Tenaga Nasional(Uniten).

Uniten can consider teaming up with prestigious Universities in the field of sports i.e University of Bath or University of Loughborough in offering twinning courses.

TNB can start incorporating this in 2020,National Junior Team Development Model.

With this in place, a new breed of hockey players will be imbued with a proficiency in English,which will put the players on the right path in their pursue in hockey and a career after their sporting life.

Putting it concise, hockey is a game that need basic intelligence to play the sport well. 





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TNB In Developing 2020, Malaysia National Junior Hockey Team

Tenaga Nasional Berhad's (TNB) contribution to Malaysian hockey is enormous and unquestionable, in terms of employment, participation in the Malaysian Hockey leagues and funding various activities of the Malaysian Hockey Confederation(MHC) in developing the game of hockey in the country.

Recently TNB has announced that MHC will receive RM4mil a year for the next five years, in total RM20million to develop hockey.

TNB is certainly the live wire to Malaysian hockey.

With the blessing from MHC, TNB has moved further into the ground in developing the next generation of hockey players for the 2020 National Junior Hockey Team.

It's an unprecedented move in Malaysian sports where a corporation is given the trust to develop a national team ; for me, it's a noble move by TNB, where other corporations should follow suit.

In making sure quality players come out of the system for 2020,National Junior team,TNB has deployed their coaches,who are all former international's employed with TNB to three Sports Schools i.e Sekolah Sukan Tuanku Mahkota Ismail, Bukit Jalil Sports School, Sekolah Sukan Pahang and one State Project School from Perak, Anderson Sports School in the ongoing Malaysian Junior Hockey league(MJHL).

Since TNB is the same shareholder for the four Sports Schools in the MJHL,the issue of conflict of interest will arise: an issue MHC needs to address,to keep the independence of the Malaysian Junior Hockey League alive.

For a comprehensive plan to be put in place to develop 2020, National Junior Team, TNB needs to understand how the present deterioration in Malaysian hockey has come into being.

Without understanding that, merely to come up with an idea,which will be a modified form, from an earlier idea, will bring further deterioration to Malaysian hockey. 

From understanding the root of the problem ,TNB can put in place a comprehensive sustainable development model, that will be the foundation to produce "World Class Hockey Players" that will bring glory to the country by achieving success in the World Cups and the Olympics consistently.

All the best and Good Luck to TNB.



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Positive Youth Development Through Sports-Part 3(Final)

Time is the last and often neglected component of the PPCT model. According to Garcia Bengoechea and Johnson (2001), human development can only be fully understood if it is examined over an extended period of time. 

Thus, in order to truly comprehend child development in sport, individual attributes and their environmental interactions must be studied over time. 

The DMSP outlines how different activities benefit children’s development at different ages, and provides a temporal progression of sport involvement with stages that are qualitatively and quantitatively different from each other. 

The first two trajectories (i.e. recreational participation through sampling and elite performance through sampling) include activities and environments that are similar during childhood and progressively different during early adolescence, late adolescence, and adulthood. 

For example,both trajectories include the sampling years, which focus on letting children experiment with various ways of executing sport skills in various contexts through deliberate play and involvement for fun in several sports. 

The DMSP suggest that children should spend more time in deliberate play activities than in deliberate practice activities during the sampling years (age 6–12). 

However, as children age and mature, the recommended amount of deliberate play activities can be slowly replaced by deliberate practice activities, depending on the eventual goals of the individual (e.g. recreation or elite sport participation). 

Thus, in youth sport programs, the time component of the PPCT model should focus on how playing and training activities change throughout development, as outlined by the DMSP.

Conclusion
This chapter has examined research in youth sport through an integrated developmental and ecological lens. 

The PPCT components of Bronfebrenner’s ecological system theory and principles of positive youth development combined with the DMSP served as a framework to increase understanding of healthy youth development through sport participation. 

Based on youth sport research,particularly Cote and colleagues’ DMSP, the following suggestions are made for youth sport programs aiming to promote positive youth development

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Ponder" Ponder" Ponder"

Recently I had an opportunity to chat with an eminent man. He was sharing with me, that one fine day he realized what he was doing for years and years was totally absurd.
I asked "How" How'' Sir?
His answer was "That fine day I had the opportunity to sit, see and ponder over at someone else doing my work and the realization just bloomed out".

This reminds me of Sir Isaac Newton the man who discovered the law of gravity. There is a popular story that Newton sat under an apple tree and when an apple fell on his head, the notion of gravity came to him. It had never occurred to him before that whenever he goes to pee, the law of gravity was being applied there.

We can see in both this incidents that the answer was in front of them but the answer only flower out when they are out of their daily routine.

In this hustle and bustle world, everyone has a set of routine that dominates his or her life and most of us fill our waking hours with the same activities.

This routine allows little room for a new discovery to take place unless you chose to make room for it.

Take a moment to ponder over all your internal and external relationships, who knows you might discover something new that will change your life and all around you.

Have a good weekend.


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