I might put too much emphasis on coaching, but it’s a crucial part of a player’s journey I feel. And recently, there were a lot of changes, not only changes but musical chairs changes!
The Nouran/Hania coaching tale….
I’ll try and explain it the best I can, well, the way I got it anyway! Hoping I got it right though…
First, we had Haitham Effat, coach to Hania El Hammamy, Nour El Tayeb, Marwan ElShorbagy, Tarek Momen for a number of years, moving to the States, more precisely to California. Which meant that Hania and Tarek were without a coach.
Approximatively at the same time, Nouran Gohar had to move to the States also to follow her husband Ziad. She started working with Rodney Martin, who seemed to enrich her game tremendously.
But I am told Omar Abdel Aziz, who had been coaching Nouran for donkey years, didn’t feel like sharing his coaching with Rod. Nouran then chose to work exclusively with the Australian.
Why do I speak about musical chairs, is because Hania then started working with Omar Abdel Aziz (previously coaching Nouran). That must have been pretty painful for Nouran. But a few weeks/months ago, Hania wanted to add Karim Darwish to her coaching team, which apparently was not accepted by Omar Abdel Aziz.
Hania is now working with Karim D.
The Terminator got her own back a few months later as she decided to work with Haitham Effat for the World Finals 2023 in Cairo. She worked with both Rod and Haitham for a while, but then seemed to choose to work with Haitham only from Chicago this year. She also added a young coach to her team, Mohamed El Gawarhy.
Omar Abdel Aziz is still working with Tarek Momen, Karim Abdel Gawad and Golden Boy Youssef Ibrahim.
