Amateur hitmaker

On a humid afternoon at China's 15th National Games held in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, in November last year, amid the polished ranks of professional youth squads, one team looked unmistakably out of place. Their uniforms were newer than their reputation, their accents unmistakably from the far north, and their faces — still boyish — betrayed a nervous energy more often found in classrooms than stadium tunnels. They were students from Qiqihar No. 1 High School, and they had just done something no one expected: finished fourth in the men's under-18 volleyball tournament, the best result Heilongjiang province had achieved in the event in 66 years.

Standing a few steps behind them, half-smiling and half-reproving, was Bao Changlin. An "amateur" coach only in the bureaucratic sense, the 55-year-old is the unlikely architect of one of the most improbable stories in recent Chinese sports.

Bao remembers the exact date the journey began — June 5, 2005. He recites it the way others recall a wedding or a birth. By then, he had already lived two professional lives: as a volleyball player, and after his retirement, as a bank employee. Volleyball however retained a hold on him. In the evenings and on weekends, he coached children for free, driven by what he describes simply as "not being able to put the ball down".

The summer of 2005, Qiqihar No 1 High School approached him to form a boys' volleyball team. There was no salary, and no guarantee of success, but Bao accepted without hesitation. What he could not have known then was that the decision would bind him to the same gym, the same school and generations of students for the next 20 years.

The early years were austere. Equipment was basic, facilities were limited and the team was regarded as an extracurricular curiosity rather than a serious athletic program. Bao approached it differently though. Drawing on his professional background and his studies at Harbin Sport University, he designed a training system that was methodical, data-driven and unsentimental. Effort mattered, but structure mattered more.

By 2007, the school had secured permission to recruit volleyball-specialty students, gradually expanding the talent pool. That same year, the team won their first provincial championship. They would not lose that title for the next 18 years. The streak was not loud, and it rarely made national headlines, but it established something rarer than trophies: continuity.

Bao's coaching style resists easy slogans. He believes in diligence — players' feet, hands, eyes and mouth must all be "busy", he says — and there can be no complacency. When the team wins, he does not replay their best moments. Instead, he screens the worst match they have played. The idea, borrowed from students' "wrong-answer notebooks", is to cool pride before it hardens into habit. He used the method again before a crucial quarterfinal at the recent National Games, when the team had just crossed the group stage with steady performance.

Individual players receive similar precision. Cao Qihao, now a core attacker, began volleyball late but trained relentlessly. Bao set a single condition: reach a vertical touch of 3.25 meters, and he could switch positions. Cao exceeded the target. When Bao discovered that Cao and his teammates were secretly doing extra training sessions — and risking injury — he stopped them immediately. Discipline, in Bao's view, means knowing when not to push. Today, Cao's reach is 3.40 meters, and he squats 180 kilograms, numbers earned within a carefully controlled system.