And here it starts again..

Getting to know TPKRT [Season 2]

Episode 1: Coach (a.k.a Jiaolian, Tay Ping Hui..)

Who's that pokemon!?

Its.... Coach!!

("Acting cute is my second profession.")

I will leave it to you whether or not he wants to tell you his name. For now I suppose you ought to know him only as "Coach".

Well, its not often you find a guy who runs, cycles, abseils, rows, swims, and basically tries to kill himself whenever he feels like it.... and still manage to look like Tay Ping Hui!

(...cough... recycled joke. But anyway..)

Right now I'll bet the most prominent impression you have about him is of his amazingly long speeches. Yes, it kind of struck me too, when i first entered the team slightly over a year ago (Goodness....its been so long)



And...err... the second would most probably be his.... interesting grasp of the English language. Or... lack thereof.


But i must applaud you guys for not laughing at him about it, although he takes it all in good humor. He's made some pretty memorable funnies over the past year, but doesn't mind us laughing about it. Well, at least we control our reactions..


For example...

"Put the table on the money" (Kok Wei: MFFTT* tried hard to control laughter*)


"Don't go and make yourselves inbehave like them" (Damien: Wth is 'inbehave'?)


"3 of you go and stroke yourselves for 8km" (Josh: *BIT LIP*)


"Whose soospack is this?" (everybody: "What's a soospack?")


we eventually found out he meant 'shoebag'.



Ok now, jokes aside, amiable as he is, Coach enforces one serious rule: There's always time for joking - and training time is not that time. Some of you may have though Kok Wei was overreacting every time he lashes out at you for laughing or smiling during training, but its a very natural thing to us, because its been drilled into us by coach, the same way its about to be drilled into you.


That's enough introductions.

Now, background info.

What you may not know, is that while the school regards coaches as mere employees (I pay you to work for me - this set amout of money for this set number of hours, you get the idea), I don't think they know that the coach from THIS team is actually the backbone of the team.

That's right- I meant that without our coach the team would probably not exist now.

The problem started around the time our current seniors' batch began progressing from the T-1 training boats (Those bulky blue ones you guys are currently training in) to these K-1 racing boats :

(the phenomenon of the boat with no rower.)

(The streamlined kayaks you guys see every saturday rowing up and down the lanes... and hopefully yearn to try, too.)

See, at the time there were 9 of us. And.... only 4 K-1s available. Aside from us, there were also 3 other seniors who needed to use the boats for their own training. This would probably have set us in quite a bind...

Here's where coach comes in. Remember these?

You may or may not remember us rowing these sexy white boats. Well, there were 10 of them (11, if you include the one he bought for his own usage) They're NELO kayaks. NELO is a world-class brand of racing kayaks. We were still short on boats to use at the start of the week, and then magically, here we were - suddenly in posession of 10 world-class kayaks.

Although the usage of these kayaks are split between 3 schools (TP, SAJC and Temasek Secondary), it was still a Godsend to finally have enough boats to train with.

And it all came out of Coach's own pocket.

You can probably see how much we owe to our coach.

Be it when we exceeded our budget for the previous year and were unable to pay coach for a couple of months.

Or when he comes down to school to supervise our land training, and swimming trainings although he is only paid to watch our water trainings.

Or when he dilligently came down every morning to open the reservoir gates for us at 8am and stayed with us until the end of our second training at about 6pm, for the entire holiday.

To us, this is a man that cannot be replaced. I don't doubt that if the school tries to replace him, for some reason or another, it won't be long before the Team crumbles.

I recounted the history of Coach and the team for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, a few may feel that 'history' is best buried, and our old problems not exposed to the world. But I feel that it will serve as a reminder, just how much we owe to our coach since the team's beginning.

Secondly, sometimes because of his ... interesting english and his rather laid-back way of doing things, some of you freshies may have the impression that he doesn't really know what he's doing. But i assure you, he is a far cry from being one of them fat old coaches who sits on their throne and reigns over the students with a loudhailer.

If he can, he usually comes down to row with us. And drill us from err... a literal arm's length away. And trust me, he still rows faster than some of us can.

So no matter what.... don't doubt him. I mean it.>.>

(TPKRT, Changi Airport, 8th October 2008)

-Kiiro