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Exclusive Interview: Chief Coach of US men’s hockey
Games are won more with mental toughness than mere mastery of skills and finer points, says Harendra Singh, chief coach of the US men’s hockey team.
Coach Harendra Singh / LinkedIn
In top-class competitive hockey, games are won more with mental toughness than mere mastery of skills and finer points, says Harendra Singh, chief coach of the US men’s hockey team.
Harendra Singh, who had worked as the chief coach of India’s men's hockey team before taking up the present assignment, says that the semi-final matches of the Santiago 2023 Pan Am Games will be decided more on mental toughness than the game's finer points.
“I want my players to believe in themselves and simultaneously take their opponents on all fronts,” adds Harendra Singh who has recently joined a select band of hockey coaches from the subcontinent on the High-Performance Coaching Panel of the International Hockey Federation.
In an informal chat with this correspondent on the sidelines of the hockey competition at the Pan Am Games, Harendra Singh talked about the plans he had for the future to spread the base of field hockey in the United States. “I am talking to representatives of various communities to seek their support for taking the sport to the grassroots level. You cannot develop teams overnight. It takes four to five years. I am getting overwhelming responses from the Indian community in the US in general and the Punjabi community in particular. Now we have a basic pool of about 170 players that form the nucleus of our future national teams,” he says.
Talking about the present team, he says that there are some promising talented youngsters, including Mehtab Grewal. I have helped him to get into the European circuit. Now he plays in the third Division of the Netherlands at Leiden. Nine members of the current US team play in the European circuit. They play either in the German or the Netherlands leagues.
“We have a good set of players. I have been working on the team not only on the finer points of the game but also on mental toughness. The team has started showing results. Our impressive wins against Trinidad and Tobago and Brazil are encouraging.
“I am keeping my fingers crossed as Argentina is a very tough professional side that has been playing together for a long time,” adds Harendra Singh, who is heading down to Kuala Lumpur to attend a special session of the High-Performance Coaching Panel of the FIH. He is perhaps the only one from South Asia nominated on the panel.
Interestingly, some States back home are keen to utilise his services for grooming youngsters. “Yes, some states have been in touch with me,” he says hoping that Indian hockey can maintain its tempo with good feeding channels from States like Punjab, Odisha, Jharkhand, and Uttarakhand.
He has moved his high-performance centre to Carolina.
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