“This is something that cannot happen in baseball.”
At the 2022 Qatar World Cup held last month, the Korean national soccer team dramatically advanced to the round of 16 by directing the ‘Miracle of Doha’. The joy of advancing to the round of 16 for the first time in 12 years was also noisy due to the revelation of the player’s personal trainer, also known as the ‘2701 Incident’. Ahn Deok-soo, who accompanied the national team captain Son Heung-min (Tottenham) as a personal trainer, claimed that he helped the players, including Son Heung-min, take care of their bodies throughout the tournament, but did not receive any support from the association and was treated unofficially. 바카라
The Korea Football Association (KFA), which did not respond to anything, announced on its official website on the 10th, a month after the incident, ‘a statement regarding the issue of mandatory trainers for the Qatar World Cup soccer team’. The association explained, “Ahn Deok-soo did not apply formally at the time of selecting the trainer for the national team, and the qualifications he had did not fall under the mandatory staff qualifications recognized by the association.” “The association cannot hire unqualified people.”
If so, wouldn’t this happen with the national baseball team going to the World Baseball Classic (WBC) in March? An official from the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) told Sports Seoul, “This is something that cannot happen in baseball.” An official said, “It’s something I’ve never even imagined, so there are no related regulations. “Because the players have never brought a personal trainer to the national team.”
The WBC national team is accompanied by trainers from 10 KBO league teams. All of them were selected after thorough verification from 10 clubs. An official from Team A said, “In the trainer recruitment part, we hire a trainer for the club after determining whether or not he has relevant experience and official licenses. It is because it is an important manpower to manage the body of the players.”
Although the regulation did not specify ‘limited to license holders’, there is a ground rule that KBO referred to in hiring trainers. If you look at the 2022 KBO’Baseball Regulations’, there is a provision that ‘Other instructors, trainers, etc. must be appointed by the KBO after consultation with the national team manager and approved by the president’, Article 3, Paragraph 3 of the ‘National Team Operation Regulations’. It is a rule that cannot enter the national team without the approval of the KBO president. KBO has hired thoroughly verified personnel based on this clause when going to international competitions.
Meanwhile, since the WBC is a major league (MLB) supervised event, the MLB Secretariat dispatches MLB club trainers to the national teams in which big leaguers participate. The Korean national team will also be accompanied by MLB trainers, including Thomas Hyun-su Edman (St. Louis), Choi Ji-man (Pittsburgh), and Kim Ha-seong (San Diego). Trainers from these three clubs do not necessarily come, and one randomly selected person takes care of the MLB players’ bodies during the WBC campaign.