These days, one video of an incident from a girls’ national youth championship match in Malaysia went viral and simply appalled the volleyball world.
Violence, especially unjustified violence, has no place in sports. It’s unfair when it involves a coach and a player, let alone when the athletes are young. This way, at a young age, their desire to play volleyball gets killed!
On December 16, Johor and Melaka competed for third place in the girls’ top division of the 2022 Malaysia Youth U14 Volleyball Championship, which was played in the Pei Hwa high school in the state of Johor. A head coach from Melaka was recorded slapping two of his players during an incident that occurred when his team was trailing Johor 16-11 in the first set. The coach was obviously furious at these two players as they cost the team a point before a timeout. Slapping can be seen at the 20-minute and 20-second mark of the live-streamed match footage on Facebook. The two girls managed to maintain their composure throughout the game and were comforted by their teammates following the coach’s assault. Melaka later put up a fight, forcing the match into a tie-break, but Johor would go on to win the match.
The violent act of the coach has certainly not gone unnoticed even by the local media, so much so as to provoke the intervention of the Minister of Youth and Sports, Hannah Yeoh; via Twitter, she condemned the incident, noting that she had already contacted colleagues to gather more information. A few hours later, Yeoh again chimed in to comment saying it’s wrong to slap anyone, not just girls, but boys too, appealing to citizens of Malaysia to “stop normalizing physical violence, whether it is against children, athletes, spouses or workers.“
Shame on you, coach! If you can even call yourself that.
