Bhaskar Bhatt steps down as head coach of Indian women's boxing team
Bhaskar Bhatt resigned as the head coach of the Indian women's boxing squad months before the Asian Games in order to focus on his new position as the high performance director SAI. The news comes just over two months before the Asian Games, which will serve as the first Olympic qualifying event.
Bhatt was hired by SAI earlier this month to serve as the boxing high-performance director. He will be in charge of managing men's and women's boxing in all SAI National Centres of Excellence (NCOEs) in his new position.
"When I was named the SAI high-performance director for boxing a few days back it came with a lot of responsibilities. I wanted to do justice to my new role," Bhatt, who is in Kazakhstan with a backup Indian squad for the Elorda Cup.
"At the national camp (in NIS Patiala), the high-performance director (Bernard Dunne) is there and the foreign coach (Dmitry Dmitruk) is also there to assess and guide the girls so I requested that I be allowed to concentrate on my new role full time," he added.
Since Irishman Bernard Dunne took over as the high-performance director in October of last year, Indian boxing has seen several adjustments.
The Boxing Federation of India (BFI), acting on the advice of Dunne, decided to rehire Dronacharya awardee C A Kuttappa as the head coach of the Indian men's boxing squad in February.
Kuttappa took over for Narender Rana, who had been named head coach in October 2021.
Dmitry Dmitruk was appointed as the foreign coach for the men's and women's teams not long after that. Currently, Bhatt is no longer the head coach of the women's squad.
In November 2021, he had been appointed the women's team's head coach. Prior to that, he had been working with the young squad since 2017, and from 2005 to 2012, he had been an assistant coach for the senior women's camp.