April 2009 saw the first two IBSF Coach Examiners put through their paces, with Joseph Mejia of San Francisco (USA) being the first coach in the world to acquire the coveted title.

Having already attended the IBSF Master Coach seven day course in January this year, Mejia went through the IBSF Master Coach once more. This time, though, his curriculum was to go through a completely different set of exercises aimed more at developing training skills and dealing with various coaching simulations that come up.

Going through 100 hours of training including pre course study to achieve IBSF Master Coach certification, Mejia also went through intensive pre course study for the Examiner training. Seven days later, he was the proud owner of the title ‘IBSF Coach Examiner’.

What this means is that with his contacts in the Americas (North and South), there is now an IBSF Coach Examiner to service all those countries.

This would hopefully lead to more new IBSF member countries in South America. In Brazil especially, ‘Sinuca’ is a massively popular game.

Albeit played on smaller tables, ‘Sinuca’ has similar rules to traditional snooker and the leap of understanding from one game to another will be easy for most coaches and players in that region.

Mejia said: “It was a dynamic course with a lot of detailed written material – very few coaching systems have this level of information.”

A report from Nic Barrow