RongMoo Community Coach Story
For more than 30 years, Coach Uan has sacrificed his time for the children of Bangkok’s RongMoo community to work as a sports instructor and community coach.
For more than 30 years, Coach Uan has sacrificed his time for the children of Bangkok’s RongMoo community to work as a sports instructor and community coach. He has a solid reputation as a mentor and as the “teacher who only gives,” and his lessons assist in igniting the aspirations of young people in the community to become professional sports players.
His objectives as a sports coach are to teach kids about sports and to motivate them to have more opportunities to enjoy sports. While still a student at the university, Coach Uan started his career as a sports coach by volunteering to coach a futsal (indoor football) team. He began mentoring neighborhood kids because he believed they could compete with kids from any other neighborhood if given the chance and the means to do so. He now believes they can compete with other elite teams after he and the community team guided the youngsters to the Bangkok championship futsal tournament, a 10-year-old futsal competition and won it. As a result of this win, he has been inspired and driven to teach kids to excel.
Beem, one of the team’s children, told us that ‘Coach Uan is pushing us to practice more so that we can bring out our best qualities, and he believes in us that we can do it no matter what. I love to practice with our coach and our team. It’s a lot of fun to practice sports with them, and we’ve always had a fantastic time together. The coach makes us more disciplined and helps us learn new sporting skills. Even though he is sometimes very strict but he is kind, funny, and loved by all the children in the community and he has a “heart of gold”.’
According to Coach Uan, “Sport is the only avenue for the students in the neighborhood to establish a decent career,” since “Many youngsters in the town are truly underprivileged and lacking in opportunity; they don’t have a clear plan for their future.” Coach Uan wants to provide youth in the community with more opportunities to practice with seasoned athletes in a variety of actual settings and to prepare them for competition so they may get a glimpse of the larger world outside of their own neighborhood. “Without Side By Side team we could have never come this far, both for me and the children.”
“Right To Play and Side By Side Team not only encourage me to become a better coach for the children but also a better coach for our community; they support us with sports equipment, coaching training, and life skills that are important for me as a coach and also for the children to learn, lead, and help them succeed in the future.”