Olympic champ to coach Phl shuttlers

MANILA, Philippines - An Olympic gold medalist and former world champion from Indonesia will soon start calling the shots for the Philippine badminton team.

Of course, it doesn’t come cheap.

Rexy Mainaky, part of the Indon team that won the doubles gold in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and the 1995 World Championships in Lausanne, carries a price tag of $12,000 (roughly P500,000) a month.

On top of his monthly salary, enough to pay a pair of local coaches for a year, Mainaky will have his two kids enrolled in a British school in Manila, and will stay in a P100,000-a-month condominium unit.

The Philippine Badminton Association, headed by Vice President Jojo Binay and with sports patron Manny V. Pangilinan as chairman, is pinning all its hopes on the 44-year-old Indon coach.

Badminton was not included by the Philippine Sports Commission in its priority list because it has failed to produce any medal for the country in international competitions.

But it won’t stop PBA officials from pursuing their dream of putting the Philippines back in the badminton map.

“Now on our part, our chairman Mr. Manny Pangilinan has raised most of the funds required by badminton. Now we have a program that has a budget of about P30 million,” Negros Occidental (third district) Rep. Albee Benitez, PBA secretary-general, recently told a local paper.

“It’s something that has never been heard of in the history of badminton,” said the youthful congressman, adding that the association will soon embark on a nationwide campaign to boost the popular sport.

Philippine Olympic Committee president Jose Cojuangco should welcome the PBA move, which could be used as a role for the other national sports associations (NSAs).

Cojuangco has cited the need for top quality foreign coaches but said since the government can’t really afford them for all the NSAs then these associations should practice self-sufficiency.

The Philippines used to pay foreign coaches a little over $2,500 a month until recently that some NSAs found their way to hire the better ones, like the Philippine football team which has experienced great surge under foreign coaches like Simon McMenemy and Michael Weiss.

“We cannot get the best coaches in the world if we will stick with that amount. So we need to spend more to hire them this time,” said Cojuangco.

With Mainaky around, the Philippines hopes to do better in the badminton scene, and relive the days when the Asuncions, Kennevic  and Kennie, and Weena Lim won medals in the SEA Games. Lim also made it to the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Mainaky had a coaching stint in England, and recently in Malaysia. There were other offers, including Russia, but he chose the Philippines because of the challenge of turning the team into a contender.

“I will have the freedom to choose the players and the coaches and draft the program from scratch. They have 20 national shuttlers without any standing in the world and this number is small for a country of 55 million,’’ he told a badminton website.

``To change all this will be a great accomplishment for a coach and this is what I intend to do,” added Mainaky, armed with credentials three inches thick.

Now he has to put his words into action.