India Women’s Hockey Team coach Janneke Schopman (Credit: X)
From poor pay to lack of coaching grounds and media protection, ladies athletes in India have lengthy confronted inequality, particularly in male-dominated sports activities corresponding to hockey and cricket.
India ladies’s hockey coach and former Olympic gold medallist Janneke Schopman has hit out on the gender disparity in the nation, each in sport and society extra broadly.
Schopman, the primary lady to teach an Indian nationwide hockey crew, broke down as she described the preferential remedy loved by the boys’s crew.
“I come from a culture where women are respected and valued. I don’t feel that here,” Schopman, 46, was quoted as saying in the Indian Express newspaper on Monday.
The former Dutch worldwide was talking after India defeated the United States by way of a tie-breaker in a FIH Pro League match in Odisha on Sunday.
From poor pay to lack of coaching grounds and media protection, ladies athletes in India have lengthy confronted inequality, particularly in male-dominated sports activities corresponding to hockey and cricket.
Schopman mentioned she felt “alone a lot in the last two years” and wasn’t “valued and respected” by her employers, Hockey India.
“I look at the difference at how men’s coaches are treated… or the girls and the men’s team, just in general,” she mentioned.
“But for me personally, coming from the Netherlands, having worked in the USA, this country is extremely difficult as a woman, coming from a culture where, yeah, you can have an opinion and it’s valued. It’s really hard.”
Schopman took over as the ladies’s crew head coach after the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, having initially joined because the analytics coach.
“Even when I was the assistant coach some people wouldn’t even look at me or wouldn’t acknowledge me… and then you become the chief coach and all of a sudden people are interested in you. I struggled a lot with that,” she mentioned.
Asked what was hardest, she mentioned: “The fact that I feel — I don’t even know if it’s true — that I am not taken seriously.”
Hockey India officers couldn’t be contacted instantly for a remark.
Schopman’s two-12 months contract runs till the Paris Olympics later this 12 months. Her crew have did not qualify for the Games, and are subsequent slated to play in the European leg of the Pro League in May.
(This story has not been edited by News18 employees and is revealed from a syndicated information company feed – AFP)
