Focus on monitoring players, coaches, officers: DG SAI

Sports Authority of India's new Director General Jiji Thomson today promised to make a change within three months, saying the focus of his tenure would be monitoring players, coaches and the officials working under him.
"I have already taken a meeting of all my staff and I have told what my priorities are. Monitoring is one of the most important things. The coaches...What they do and what are their output," said Thomson.
"We must come up with a system where we monitor activities of the players, coaches and also my officers," he added.
Thomson, who is an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of the 1980 Kerala cadre batch, said there are other aspects like the condition of the stadia that need to be looked into.

"Till yesterday I was criticising SAI myself but now that I have taken over, it is very important to set the house in order first of all.
"There are large number of problems in SAI that need to be addressed. We will have to find out the condition of the stadia, procurement of equipment, Look at the centres," Thomson said on the sidelines of a felicitation function to honour the participants of the Asian Grand Prix Archery Championship at Bangkok and the Asian Youth Boxing Championship in Philippines.

The new DG has asked for three months to fix things up.

"I would ask you to give me three months to put everything in order," said Thomson.
Asked about the issues such as non availability of enough doctors at the NIS Patiala to cater to the needs of thousands of athletes, Thomson said, "NIS Patiala is one of our premier institutes and I am planning to go there and find out what is happening.