India Women’s Hockey Team coach Janneke Schopman (Credit: X)
From poor pay to lack of coaching grounds and media protection, girls athletes in India have lengthy confronted inequality, particularly in male-dominated sports activities similar to hockey and cricket.
India girls’s hockey coach and former Olympic gold medallist Janneke Schopman has hit out on the gender disparity within the nation, each in sport and society extra broadly.
Schopman, the primary girl to teach an Indian nationwide hockey staff, broke down as she described the preferential remedy loved by the lads’s staff.
“I come from a culture where women are respected and valued. I don’t feel that here,” Schopman, 46, was quoted as saying within the Indian Express newspaper on Monday.
The former Dutch worldwide was talking after India defeated the United States through a tie-breaker in a FIH Pro League match in Odisha on Sunday.
From poor pay to lack of coaching grounds and media protection, girls athletes in India have lengthy confronted inequality, particularly in male-dominated sports activities similar to hockey and cricket.
Schopman stated 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 stated.
“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 staff 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 stated.
Asked what was hardest, she stated: “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-year contract runs till the Paris Olympics later this 12 months. Her staff have didn’t qualify for the Games, and are subsequent slated to play within the European leg of the Pro League in May.
(This story has not been edited by News18 workers and is revealed from a syndicated news company feed – AFP)
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