Coimbatore coach kindles poor students’ basketball dreams
COIMBATORE: Share your knowledge; it is a way to immortality, said Dalai Lama. V Prabhu (42), a basketball coach in Coimbatore, is doing exactly that. Prabhu took a liking to basketball when he was in class VI and joined YMCA. A class 10 dropout, he took up coaching in 2000 and offered his services free to several schools in the city. Some of his pupils have made it big. Akilan Pari, who plays in the pro-basketball league, is one of them.
R Satheesh, one of Prabhu’s students, said: “He takes care of the expenses whenever we take part in a tournament.” Before finding his feet in the business of making rubber stamps, number plates for automobiles and labels, he used to do odd jobs to make ends meet. He now runs a shop in Town Hall and spends almost the entire revenue on training his wards, who are mostly government school students from poor families.
Prabhu had also coached the basketball team of St. Michael’s higher secondary school. The team won the fourth place in the State-level tournament in 2006-07 and sixth place in the national level event. He is now a coach at the CCMA Government Girls Higher Secondary School.