My first World Championships

Maak kennis met Senna van den Beukel!

You would expect that a Vietnam player didn't know so many people in a country like Denmark, but after playing in the second division for two years now, I know many of the players, coaches and officials in my new country. This makes it extra fun to be at a event like this, and the fact that I can see and speak to my old friends and training partners Thi Trang Vu and Tien Minh Nguyen.

I stay in Denmark to become a elite coach and in order to do so I need to learn Danish, so I go to school 4 days a week and in the evening I give training at 3 Danish clubs, working with many good coaches and players like Thomas Laybourn, Lars Kolding and Peter Mork. My mentor is the Dutch coach Ron Daniels.

In these World Championships I have to get better in the tactical strategy on elite level so I walk beside Ron and we analyze the matches. After a couple hours working like this my head is spinning round about all the details I have to focus on. In single matches it is not so difficult but the doubles are a whole different ball game, and specially when he asks me to do it on two courts at a time. When you look at one court you can make notes but with two matches there is no time for that. You will loss too much when you write so you have to remember what happened and after 5 to 10 minutes we talk about it. That is extremely difficult to do because he remembers everything all the time.

My goal was to be able to make a good analysis of the single match of Thi Trang Vu against Lohaynny Vicente from Brazil. When Ron was national coach for the U19 in Vietnam and I was his assistant we worked with Thi Trang Vu on a daily basis so we know her very well. This match was an easy one to work with because the Brazilian girl was not a good player at all and Thi Trang Vu did not have to work so hard. Working and fighting is her big weapon, she moves very easy on the court but has problems taking her ARH. The way she gets into this corner is too far away from the shuttle line and therefore she has to do extra work to get out of this position after the stroke. My focus point was therefore also to have a look at the influence of the ARH on her footwork and to make a proposal on how to make this more efficient.

The two good players from Vietnam (Tien Minh Nguyen and Thi Trang Vu) are both hard workers. It would be good if we could get players from my country to be better technically and in tactics so we will have a strong combination for the hard and smart badminton. The hard way I already know after 10 years professional playing in Vietnam, about the smart way I'm learning now in Denmark and when I return to my own country I hope to be an elite top coach.

Duong Nhut Huynh