Reaching goal is more important than set: Monalisa Barua Mehta

Our Sports Reporter

GUWAHATI: 'Set your own goal and work on it with some specific plans, play together, respects your coaches and don't be jealous….' these are some of the valuable tips received by the young and budding table tennis players of the state from two legendary paddlers Monalisa Barua Mehta and Kamalesh Mehta during an interactive session.

The interactive session was organized by the Assam Table Tennis Association through zoom and around 70 players from across the state take part in it.

Talking to The Sentinel from Mumbai Monalisa Barua today said, "The interactive session was very good and I hope players would be benefitted from it. It's nice to see that so many players turned up to hear us and they were also very keen to learn."

Sharing the different moments of interactive session Monalisa said, "Kamalesh and me basically tried to motivate the players so that they can give their hundred percent in the game and reach to their goal. Setting a goal is very simple but to reach there is not an easy task. You have to do a lot of sacrifice, proper planning, hard work and we highlighted those areas through different examples and also by our own experience."

During her playing days Assam was one of the teams to watch in national circuit. Monalisa felt it was possible because all the players played in a single place. It helped the players to gather experience by playing against different opponents.

"It is really important to change your practice opponent time to time. Because the playing style of all the players are not same. So whenever you will play against a different opponent you will learn something new. Exactly same things were happened during our times as all of us played at the Nehru stadium and every day we got the opportunity to play against a different opponent. During the interaction I also suggested the young players to follow similar thing. There place of learning may not be same but players of same city can unite at one venue together at least once in a week and play against each other," said the Arjuna awardee.

On the other hand she also felt that players need to respect coaches and not to be jealous. Both can bring negative impact on the performance.

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