My First Coach

Before I ever understood leadership, discipline or excellence, I had already experienced them.

I just did not have the language for them yet.

My first coach was my father.

His name is Hashim Sidek.

Many people know him as the former captain of the Singapore National Tennis Team, a Davis Cup representative, a SEA Games athlete and a coach who has spent much of his life shaping tennis players.

I simply know him as Papa.

Growing up, I did not think of Papa as my coach.

I thought he was strict.

He was a disciplinarian. He expected respect. He expected us to listen. He expected things to be done properly.

And, to be honest, I was scared of him.

That was how I understood him as a child.

Children experience their parents before they understand them. We feel their presence, their expectations, their moods and their rules long before we can comprehend the lives they lived before us.

To me, Papa was simply Papa.

I did not yet understand what it meant to represent Singapore.

I did not understand what it took to become captain of a national team.

I did not understand the discipline required to compete at the SEA Games or to play in the Davis Cup.

Those achievements belonged to a life that had begun before mine.

By the time I came along, Papa was already carrying more than one identity.

He was an athlete.

A husband.

A new father.

And eventually, a coach.

When I was still an infant, Papa was training with the National Team.

One day, his coach found him asleep during training.

Papa was exhausted.

That was when he decided to step away from the team.

For a long time, I heard that as a simple family story.

Papa fell asleep during training. His coach found him. He quit the National Team.

But as I grew older, the story began to change.

Not because the facts changed.

Because I did.

As a child, I heard the story without understanding what exhaustion meant.

As an adult, I hear it differently.

I think about the demands of elite sport.

I think about responsibility.

I think about the private choices people make when two parts of their lives can no longer be sustained in the same way.

I do not know whether Papa experienced that moment as sacrifice, disappointment, relief or simply necessity.

Perhaps it was all of them.

Real decisions are rarely as neat as the stories we later tell about them.

It would be easy for me to say that Papa chose his family over his sporting career.

It would make for a beautiful sentence.

But life is usually more complicated than a beautiful sentence.

What I do know is that one chapter ended.

And another began.

Papa stopped representing Singapore as a player, but he never left tennis.

He became a coach by profession.

He continued to shape athletes, passing on not only technique, but also discipline, standards and the ability to endure frustration.

And without ever formally appointing himself to the role, he also became my first coach.

Not on a tennis court.

In life.

One of my fondest memories of Papa has nothing to do with sport.

He would return home at around ten at night after a long day of coaching.

By then, he must have been tired.

But instead of immediately withdrawing into rest, he would wrestle with us.

My mother would tell him that it was dirty.

We had been rolling around. The floor was not a playground. It was late.

But those moments were what I looked forward to.

The same man I feared for his discipline was also the man whose return home could transform the living room.

That contradiction stayed with me.

Papa was strict, but playful.

Demanding, but present.

Serious about standards, yet willing to come home after a full day and meet his children on the floor.

As a child, I did not know how to hold both versions of him together.

Perhaps I thought one had to cancel out the other.

If someone was strict, how could he also be tender?

If someone frightened you, how could you also feel safe in his presence?

If discipline felt uncomfortable, how could it also be a form of care?

Adulthood has taught me that people are rarely one thing.

Our parents especially.

We first encounter them through the narrow perspective of childhood. We see what they allow us to see, and we interpret it through the limited understanding available to us.

Only later do we begin to see the person behind the role.

The man behind Papa.

The athlete who had once carried the expectations of a nation.

The young father who was exhausted enough to fall asleep during training.

The professional coach who spent his days developing others.

The disciplinarian who still found the energy to wrestle with his children at night.

When I look at my own life today, I can see traces of him in places I never noticed before.

My belief in preparation.

My discomfort with carelessness.

My instinct that details matter.

My expectation that people should take responsibility for what has been entrusted to them.

My conviction that excellence is not created in one dramatic moment, but through repeated acts that may never be applauded.

I cannot say that Papa sat me down and taught me each of these principles.

Most of them were never delivered as lessons.

They were experienced.

That may be the deepest form of coaching.

A coach does not shape people only through instruction.

A coach shapes people through standards.

Through consistency.

Through correction.

Through presence.

Through what is tolerated and what is not.

Through the way they respond when things become difficult.

Through the example they set when nobody is asking them to perform.

Long before I could articulate a philosophy of experience, I was already being shaped by one.

Home was my first environment.

Papa was one of its strongest forces.

I used to think coaching was something that happened when a person deliberately taught another person how to improve.

Now I think it can begin much earlier than that.

Sometimes we are being coached before we know we are learning.

Sometimes we inherit standards before we understand their value.

Sometimes the lessons that frustrate us most in childhood become the ones we rely on most in adulthood.

And sometimes, it takes years before we recognise the people who were shaping us.

That recognition does not erase every difficulty.

It does not mean that a child’s fear was imaginary or that discipline was always perfectly expressed.

Gratitude does not require us to rewrite the past into something flawless.

It asks us to see more of it.

To understand that love may have arrived in forms we did not yet recognise.

To acknowledge that our parents were human beings carrying histories, responsibilities and pressures we could not see.

To realise that while we were becoming ourselves, they were still becoming themselves too.

Today, when I think about Papa’s life, I do not think only about the matches he played or the teams he represented.

Those achievements matter.

He wore the Singapore colours.

He captained the National Team.

He represented the country at the SEA Games and in the Davis Cup.

But I also think about the quieter years that followed.

The hours spent coaching.

The standards passed from one generation to another.

The family he returned home to after work.

The children waiting for him at ten o’clock at night.

Perhaps legacy is not only what we accomplish publicly.

Perhaps it is also what continues privately through the people we shape.

A title can be recorded.

A medal can be displayed.

A match can be remembered.

But influence moves differently.

It travels through habits.

Through expectations.

Through the way a son enters the world and eventually realises that some of his strongest convictions did not begin with him.

They were inherited.

Papa once captained Team Singapore.

Without ever wearing a captain’s armband again, he spent the rest of his life captaining our family.

I did not always understand the way he coached me.

Today, I recognise how much of the man I am still carries the lessons of the man who raised me.

Thank you, Papa.

My first coach.

In life.

In everything.