In the hope of boosting passion for basketball, former students from the National University of Tainan’s Department of Physical Education have been volunteering to coach elementary-school students at after-school basketball clubs.
Lo Yu-wei (羅友威) and Huang Po-wei (黃柏維), graduates from the department, said they started teaching the sport at elementary school clubs two years ago.
Huang and Lo said that most of those who volunteer as coaches were in college basketball teams themselves. After graduating, some have found work as lifeguards or coaches at fitness centers and now several of them are also helping to promote basketball and support young children as they start playing the sport — the volunteers say it is their shared love of basketball that motivates them to share their time.
“Whether they can play basketball well or not doesn’t really matter; what matters is that they have fun while playing it,” Huang said.
However, Huang and Lo said seeing young children become better at hoop-shooting while also grasping some of the sport’s key moves gave them a sense of accomplishment.
“It’s like giving them the hope that it is possible to become something akin to Jeremy Lin (林書豪),” they said, referring to the first Taiwanese-American basketball player to ever play point-guard for the NBA’s New York Knicks when he started with the squad in February.
“We also hope to see basketball become a more widely played sport,” Huang said, adding that the game is not just about sport, but also a way of expanding social relationships and developing life skills.
Huang and Lo said that kids who think they play better tend to keep the ball and run a solo show on the court “and we have to tell them that sometimes other players on their teams also have strengths and specialities,” adding that it is important to ingrain good concepts in the minds of elementary-school children.
Many kids today have no siblings, so they do not really know how to interact with children their age, Huang and Lo said, adding that playing basketball helps teach younger children how not to snub other people and work in a team.
It is encouraging to see children who have been learning for the first year come back for the second and then even ask how they might make it onto the school team in junior-high school, they added.
Although Lo and Huang, initiators of the club coaching program, are both going to Australia to work and for further studies, they said they are getting some of the junior students in the department to look out for the clubs while they are gone.
“We hope to see that the club coaching is still going strong when we come back,” they said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching