Seeing four-year-old Du An'na enjoying somersaults on the mat with her peers in the gym, her mother sat nearby, smiling quietly.

"She likes practising gymnastics," said the mother, surnamed Wu, as she watched the chortling little girl.

"A coach from the Hongkou District No. 1 Amateur Teenage Sports School went to my daughter's kindergarten and selected her. My girl came here last October."

To Wu's joy, the girl was soon obsessed with practising for the sport.

"I had been afraid that she did not want to come," she said. "I have long favoured gymnastics, and it was the same with my own mother. In fact, this type of training can very easily arouse children's interest."

To ensure the girl completes her daily training course, the mother accompanies her to the gym, and waits there till the course is over. Yet the young mother also hoped the girl could develop the characteristics of persistence, independence and assiduity.

"I do not want her to be spoiled," she added.

Recruitment problem

However, the strong enthusiasm of this mother and daughter is now rare in the city, and many amateur sports schools are facing a crucial and potentially fatal difficulty: fewer children want to come to participate in systematic exercise.

"Presently, there are around 50 children practising gymnastics here," said Wang Xiaomei, a coach in this field from school. "While in the past, we could recruit around 50 a year."

Wang declined to reveal exactly how many children they had enrolled, saying "only a few".

However, according to Wu, the coach had selected more than 10 children from the same kindergarten as her daughter, but only her girl came.

"Among girls, altogether only two were recruited along with my daughter. I heard that six were needed to form a team," she added.

In the eyes of Wang who has worked as a coach for more than 10 years, parents nowadays are reluctant to let children experience hardship.

"Children today have more choices in education, and it is relatively easy to attend colleges and universities," she said.

Moreover, the child population has greatly decreased. According to the school, students in primary schools in the district only totalled around 3,000, compared with more than 10,000 a few years ago.

Amateur sports schools were launched in China during the 1950s to develop the country's sporting prowess, with almost all such schools relying on government funding. In Shanghai, each district had at least one such school, usually offering various activities such as gymnastics, badminton, volleyball, athletics, fencing, swimming, weight-lifting and wrestling. Students would typically attend exercises after school, so such schools were called "amateur" ones.

Football challenge

In China, sports people were divided into three categories, with students in the amateur sports schools as reserves. Excellent students with great potential would enter professional schools for further training. Later, these students might be promoted to municipal or national teams. It is widely believed that such a system based on amateur sports schools contributed a lot to China's development as a sports power.

However, problems have gradually arisen in recent years, and the shortage of training equipment and grounds has added to the difficulty caused by the shortage of trainees.

Located in a residential community, Hongkou No. 2 Amateur Teenage Sports School has around 10 sports options, yet it only has proper facilities for shooting.

"We have to carry out our training programmes in other schools," said Lin Fulan, headmaster of the school. "Our bicycle trainees have to ride on the street in Pudong where there are relatively few vehicles."

Due to a shortage of necessary facilities, Lin said that archery would be suspended.

"Sports training requires large investments," she said. "Take shooting as an example. Trainees in our school use a total of 400,000 bullets, and the cheapest bullets cost around 0.5 yuan (U$0.06) each."

However, the tuition cost of training in such schools is relatively cheap.

"I only charge each student 50 yuan (US$6) a semester," said Zhou Weiming, headmaster of the Huangpu District Amateur Teenage Sports School as well as a fencing coach.

"For some items such as weight-lifting and wrestling there is no charge at all."

The school also shoulders the expenditure involved in the students' contests.

In contrast to the plight of amateur schools run by the government, private football schools have mushroomed in the city.

Shenhua Football School, a boarding school established in 2001, now has around 500 students, a scale as large as a big amateur school in the city.

The school is also a base of the Shenhua Football Team, which has won the championship in China's Football Division A.

Although different kinds of fees total more than 30,000 yuan (US$3,630) per student, the school has still recruited more than 100 students.

"We just work to ensure that the Shenhua Club can successfully participate in its games," said Sheng Baoshan, headmaster of the school.

In addition to benefiting from the fame of the Shenhua Club, the school also boasts 10 standard football fields, a gym, an indoor swimming pool, basketball fields and tennis courts, which are all luxury facilities as far as the amateur schools are concerned.

"Because of the private football schools, our men's football team finds it hard to recruit trainees," Zhou said. "We have steered towards women's football training."

To drag the school out of its plight, Zhou has long tried to join hands with ordinary schools.

"My fencing training is now in a middle school, and my trainees are students from the school," he explained.

Thus, the team can represent both the sports school as well as the middle school.

"This is a helpful stimulant to arouse enthusiasm and support from schools," he said.

(Shanghai Star February 26, 2004)