Indian Women’s Hockey Coach Sjoerd Marijne Has Unfinished Business

“Sorry family, I coming again later.”

Almost exactly five years ago, coach Sjoerd Marijne posted a picture with his girls—the Indian women’s hockey squad—from a team bus. For 16 months, he had been denied the chance to travel back home to the Netherlands, to his wife and children, due to Covid-19 restrictions.

The team had made their first-ever Olympic semi-final at the deferred Tokyo 2020 Olympics, prevailing 1-0 over a team that had come out of one of the more elite hockey set-ups: Australia. After finishing last at Rio 2016, the girls were on course to achieving what no one would have imagined. And with the bus selfie, Marijne was channelling his typical zaniness. After all, the Dutch tactician was dead close to realising a dream—an Olympic Gold for his girls in India.

On August 4, the Rani Rampal-led unit went down 1-2 against Argentina. The next thing was to compete for Bronze. The Indians saw Great Britain scrape past 4-3 two days later.

That very day, following the loss, Marijne felt it was time to finally come to family. The Dutchman stepped down as the Indian women’s hockey team head coach and returned to the Netherlands.

But before that, coach Marijne showed that women’s hockey had real potential. Prior to the historic fourth-place finish at Tokyo, they had secured a silver medal in the 2018 Jakarta Asian Games. Even in a country where you’d imagine a sport like hockey—women’s hockey, no less—went unnoticed except for every four years when our overall medals tally would be all over the news, people knew that coach Marijne mustn’t go.

Real hero. King. Please don’t leave sir. Did it right boss. You hang on a bit more coach. A week after his retirement, the comments started pouring in under a goofy picture he had posted before the quarterfinal, captioned: “Calling the family that they have to wait a few days more before I arrive home.”

Earlier this year, after being away for four years, Marijne returned to fulfil the dream, accepting another stint with the women’s team, with the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics not too far away. “They called me at the right moment. I was really doubting my future,” Marijne tells me on a Zoom call from SAI Bengaluru, where the team is training for the FIH Hockey World Cup later this month.

“I later came to know that the girls themselves took my name. That helped my case. When it comes from the team, it really means something,” says Marijne, adding that the fact that his children had grown up in the intervening time also made the decision easy.

Meanwhile, the Indian team has continued to make strides under him in the second stint, including an unbeaten run at the eight-team Nations Cup held in New Zealand in June. “The team is very confident. We did some good tours, qualified for the World Cup and the Pro League. We won the Nations Cup. All of this has brought the players a lot of confidence,” says coach Marijne, before adding, “We did really well in the Nations Cup, but I’d be realistic about the game versus Japan, where we struggled.”

• FIH Hockey Women’s Nations Cup, 2025-26 India beat hosts New Zealand 2-0 in the finals

• Tokyo Olympics, 2020 Secured a historic fourth-place finish after losing Bronze narrowly in the game against Great Britain

• Jakarta-Palembang Asian Games, 2018 The girls beat China 1-0 in the semis but lost to Japan 2-1 in the final

Challenges Ahead

• The 2026 FIH Hockey World Cup

• Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games, 2026

• Los Angeles Olympics, 2028

Much like in his first stint, Marijne has arrived to a squad with abilities that need direction. Having taken the Dutch Under-21 women’s side to World Cup title and the senior women’s side to a Gold at the Hockey World League semi-finals in 2015, he has plans to combine Indian agility with the structure and discipline of Dutch hockey: “I’m a big believer in it—and it’s what brought the Dutch women so far, to the top of the world.”

“The Indians are very famous for their fast wrists. Very fast hands,” he says. The famous Indian dribble, which the Indian and Pakistani men’s teams first demonstrated at the 1956 Summer Olympics, was one of the cultural stick work strengths that made the India of Dhyan Chand a feared hockey side. Marijne knows it’s not something every unit has equal command over.

“Where the present challenge lies, is using it at the right moment,” says Marijne. “For instance, we would run too much with the ball. We are now learning when to pass and when to run.”

Men Without Women

The Dutch play some of the best hockey in the world. Good enough to keep a man of Marijne’s skill out of the Oranje, the Dutch national squad. Where he did shine was Den Bosch, in the Hoofdklasse, the top division of field hockey for men in the Netherlands, winning the competition in 1998 and 2001 and bagging the EuroHockey Club Champions Cup in 1999.

After working with several youth squads back home in the Netherlands, Marijne was appointed coach of the Indian women’s team in 2017. However, not too long after, he was moved to the men’s side as the men’s coach Roelant Oltmans was suddenly let go. Next year, Marijne was back to lead the girls in yet another restructuring.

“With women, what I have always liked as a coach is that if you have a connection with them, they will follow you without doubt. Men will always have a discussion or ask why. And again, with these things, one thing isn’t necessarily better than the other. Because if men ask why, maybe you come to another solution,” he says.

What has been common to coaching men and women is the translation of ‘culture guards’, a concept that he imbibed over a decade of playing for Den Bosch.

“At Den Bosch, we had a few international players who won Olympic Golds, including Jeroen Delmée and Ronald Jansen. And they always led by the right example, be it taking on responsibility when the pressure was high or ensuring a relaxed atmosphere in the team at all times. These senior players, who I call culture guards, have to bring their best to every training session and every match,” he explains.

“Individuals who feel protected in any way, or that the coach will not drop them, have to go. And I keep telling them that talking is fine, but I believe more in showing,” says the coach, who has inherited a squad full of veterans such as Savita Punia, Nikki Pradhan and Sushila Chanu Pukhrambam, captained by a 24-yearold, the Jharkhand-born midfielder Salima Tete.

Gunning For Glory

Marijne, for whom the respect and admiration he received in India was a big reason for the immediate yes to the second stint, has seen Chak De! India (2007). Of course, he has. Shah Rukh Khan, who played a beleaguered women’s hockey coach desperately in search of redemption from a false traitor tag, retweeted his coming-back-to-family post, from earlier, in his own quick-witted, affectionate way: “Haan haan no problem. Just bring some gold on our way back... for a billion family members”.

For Marijne, the comparison with Kabir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan’s character in the film, has been inevitable and profuse, as is surmisable from his resigned affirmative to the question. And yet, the role of a sincere man fighting hard to get a female sports unit to believe in themselves, is a trope that doesn’t seem to be getting old anytime soon. Look at Ted Lasso, the newly arrived fourth and final season of which has taken the charming route fans long expected it to take: coach Lasso taking up an assignment with a second-division women’s football team.

In our imagination, Marijne is currently that man. Field hockey, long considered India’s national sport without any official confirmation, primarily thanks to the country’s Olympic dominance in the discipline for four straight decades (1928-64), has found it hard to breathe against the fattening colossus of cricket. The rest of the country’s attention for women’s sports has shifted to cricket, too, especially with India bringing home a maiden World Cup earlier this year and the ballooning interest in the WPL.

And so, to fulfil the LA 2028 goal, Marijne needs his girls to be gunning for glory. “We’ve proven that we are number nine in the world, but we have to now enter the top eight,” says the coach, recalling a speaker who had scaled Mount Everest visiting the squad for a lecture.

“For us, LA 2028 is our Mount Everest. That’s our dream. We know the goal is very high, but the thing is, if you reach for the stars, even if you fall, you will still be on the highest mountains.”

All Coach Marijne asks of his team is to try and get to the base camp. “Base Camp 1 for us is qualifying for the Pro League. From there, we will get to Base Camp 2— which will be doing well in the World Cup.”

He knows that ticking small goals off will build it up for his girls. And he feels both of his base camps are goals they can reach. “We set small goals even during individual sessions. But we take them a little bit out of their comfort zone—that’s where you learn,” says Marijne, who credits strength and conditioning coach Wayne Lombard, assistant coach Matías Vila and penalty corner coach Taeke Taekema for this new resurgence.

Marijne is a dreamer—so I take him, briefly, to the morning he wakes up to find his dream wasn’t merely a dream. The soft morning light reaches his cheek as he opens his eyes and finds himself on Everest: Los Angeles 2028. How does he intend to celebrate?

“I’ll rush to hug my family. They don’t see me often. They’ve been with me and cheered for me. Then I’m going to look forward to the craziness that erupts back here in India. But first, we have to go back to what is necessary for today,” concludes coach Marijne. He has a training session to get to.