Renovation plays spoilsport

[1]

Two years ago, much was there to hope for Kozhikode in badminton, and the city was gaining an international prominence with the level of players the city produced and the tournaments held.

However, these two years of delayed work of the Indoor Stadium has crippled the hopes of badminton enthusiasts in the city and also crumbled the training facilities of the association, thanks to the 35th National Games renovation.

Kozhikode boasts of producing several international players including V. Diju, Aparna Balan and Arun Vishnu, but the future looks bleak. “We have no training facilities here.

The indoor stadium had eight courts and was the centre of badminton once. But, with the delayed works, the stadium is unavailable, and for the past two years, we are just groping in the dark,” says Manalil Vijayan, Kozhikode badminton association secretary.

The one who bore the brunt of the unavailability of the badminton court is the players under the age category of 19 years.

“Senior players are training in Hyderabad and Bangalore in various academies. Without proper training and tournaments, we are not even able to scout for talents as we did before,” he says.

Once we had conducted three national ranking tournaments in the stadium, we are now left with not even one state tournament.

“It is really hard to conduct a tournament. The courts we are using now belong to various clubs and are in various parts of city. Moreover, we have to pay to use it,” he says.

The inconvenience in training has made the association cut short the number of players participating in the summer camp. “Earlier, we selected about 130 students.

Now we are able to accommodate only 60 players. Daily, we are getting enquiries, but have to turn them down.

If it goes like this for a year too, the game will be in peril in the district that was rising in prominence at the international level,” he said.

It is the work of the flooring of the Indoor Stadium that’s getting delayed mainly because of the delay in awarding the contract.

“Actually, they had to build a new stadium instead of renovating the existing one,” he says.