“It has always been my dream to set up an academy …” — Ronald Susilo (Part 1)

By Koh Yizhe/red Sports

After announcing his retirement from professional badminton in March 2010, local badminton star Ronald Susilo progressed on to the next stage of his life — the opening of his own training school, the Ronald Susilo Badminton Academy.

Aside from heading an academy of his own, Ronald is also one of the coaches of the Singapore national badminton team. He also coaches the Meridian Junior College badminton team.

Red Sports recently caught up with Ronald to find out more about his new academy and his views on Singapore badminton.

Red Sports: Hi Ronald. Tell us more about your new academy.
Ronald Susilo: Basically, it is a training place to groom players. We are open to adults, children and anybody who is interested to learn badminton. It comprises of three levels — beginner, intermediate and advance. Even adults can join the beginner level!

I also set it up to groom talents from young, mature them as players and hopefully they will go into the national team and take on badminton as a career eventually. That’s what I hope for.

Red Sports: What made you want to set up this academy?
Ronald Susilo: I think it has always been my dream. After my playing career, I wanted to continue to be involved with badminton and setting up an academy is one way. Besides coaching the national team, I wanted to have my own academy, my own business.

The Singapore Badminton Association (SBA) have their own proper training program and in fact, I am also one of their coaches. But SBA is concentrating on the elite level athletes and the national team, and not so much on the younger level.

For my academy I would like to concentrate on the beginners and the young ones. They don’t have the opportunity to train with SBA so hopefully they can come to my academy to train.

Red Sports: In setting up this academy, what do you hope to achieve? Increase the level of badminton in Singapore, maybe?
Ronald Susilo: Definitely! I hope it increases the popularity of and participation in badminton as well! But not just that, I also hope to increase the general interest in badminton and I hope the students will take it seriously and eventually consider it as a career.

Currently, it is slowly increasing in numbers.

Red Sports: What is your coaching style like? How is it different from other academies?
Ronaldo Susilo: Actually, I am not sure about other academies but I’ve heard they train in big masses, with a lot of people. I don’t really like big masses as I think for quality training, you can’t do it with too many people.

I want to focus on the quality of the training so the ratio for the elite level is probably about two or three per court while intermediate would be about, at most, four people per court. For beginners, we can always modify the training to fit about four to six people. Some can do physical training first, rotating onto the courts for technique training.

I want to be more focused on people who really want to train to be a professional and not just for leisure purposes. In this sense, the quality of badminton will be increased.

Red Sports: Speaking of the quality of badminton, could you describe the state of badminton in Singapore in your opinion?
In terms of popularity, it is still very popular! You always see the public courts being fully booked so for leisure, the sport is doing well.

But for the national team, it is a different story. There are more people in the team as compared to my time, but we need senior players to bring the younger players to a higher level. There’s a big gap between world class players and the current players in the squad.

We need to fill up this gap by bringing in more sparring partners who are more senior than them to bring up their level. So I would say this is an area that is lacking.

“You have to make a sacrifice between studies and playing badminton …” — Ronald Susilo (Part 2)
“We have to fork out money ourselves …” — Ronald Susilo (Part 3)