Uun appointed honorary member

On the last competition training evening of the season, Uun Santosa said goodbye as head coach of OSM Badminton. First, the competition players from last season were put in the spotlight. Then Ronald Koenis took the floor to era Santosa to explain. He ended with a special gift: a framed club shirt with the title Honorary Member. This made Uun’s appointment as an honorary member of OSM Badminton official. There was a banner, an Indonesian dinner voucher and of course a bunch of flowers for the retiree. We wish him all the best and lots of badminton fun in Indonesia!

The board.

(More photos were taken, to follow later.)

The speech: Era Santosa

A long, long time ago I was the raging reporter for the OSM newspaper. In the autumn 1998 edition I wrote about a new acquisition: top trainer Uun Santosa is going to train OSM† Uun, you already had an impressive list of achievements: multiple Dutch champion in both singles and doubles; You were in the national selection for 10 years and you were the trainer of Dutch record-holding champion Dicky Palyama. And this man went to train our league players on Wednesday and Friday.

The latter has not changed in all that time: you trained us on those Wednesdays and Fridays for 24 seasons. But in the meantime your palmares, your list of achievements, continued to grow: you won tournaments with your double buddy Andy Tan. You were feared at the Veterans Championships, where you also came out in a younger age category because you wanted the challenge. You often became Dutch champion and even European champion and in 2015 also World Champion!

You are famous and infamous for your game insight and your technique on the court. I have spoken to people who feared you about it, but also people who were proud to play against you on the badminton court.

But for OSM you continued to give those training sessions on Wednesday and Friday. Just some numbers:

– 24 seasons of continuous training, 30 to 35 training weeks per year. In total about 1600 training sessions, like 400 players.

– 60 times a team became champion under your guidance. The first team already had well-known names: Niels Eijkelkamp, ​​Gerard and Ronald Kieft and Sandor Musto.

– 20 times the team also managed to become regional champions.

– and five of these teams came to a silver medal at the Dutch National Championships for teams.

You were the driving force behind our most successful players, I will name three:

1. Sandra van Rooijen: played international tournaments,

2. Yannic Smeets: still plays in the Eredivisie at Smashing,

3. Kirsten van der Valk: winner of the Junior Master and she won the Eredivisie with BCA.

You were also my practical supervisor in my own trainer training and gave me the opportunity to get a taste of coaching. What you conveyed was your passion for the development of children who want to commit themselves and who help you to get better and better. Sometimes even with private training sessions that you then added on Mondays. A genuinely passionate trainer pur sang.

We are here together because you are officially retiring and combining that with a new future in your native Indonesia. That’s where you once started with badminton and it’s good that you go there, they can learn some badminton technique.

Today we say goodbye to you as our head coach, but we trust that you will return from time to time on our training course to teach new players the finer points of badminton!