The ideal coaching structure

Prem Panicker is terrific - he has clarity of thought that few possess. Read his post on Cricinfo - especially the bit about coaching. Copy - pasting that bit here - nice, simple and quite easy to implement, if anyone cared to. What we have instead is a hapazard coaching structure, good in a few states, terrible in most others, and no consistent structure to evaluate and rank prospects.

...a good starting point would be to implement and fine tune a pyramidal
coaching structure, with the schools, colleges, maidans and local leagues as the
broad base, and age-limit, district and state-level teams the stepping stones to
the top.

Today, systematic coaching begins only at age-level cricket, or later,
by which point you've learnt all the bad habits anyway, and you've left the
coach nothing to do but tinker. Against that, consider a system where there is
one national coach. Under him, and interacting with him on a regular basis, the
state coaches; under this second tier, the district coaches; under each district
coach, assistant coaches in charge of school, college and league-level cricket.

The benefit of such a system is in uniformity – since each tier works
in close cooperation with the one immediately above, players working their way
up the ranks won't find themselves spun around in circles, encountering new
methods at every step. The obvious add-on to that is continuity. The
direction of a national coaching academy cannot be a political favor handed out
in return for votes; surely it is ridiculous that the NCA has, since its
inception, had its chief changed after every BCCI election? The director needs
to be a paid professional, appointed for a specified duration, given a clear
brief, and the authority to carry it out; with that responsibility comes its
corollary, accountability.

The academy needs to be a year-round enterprise – a school that
functions for a fortnight or a month in a year is not likely to throw up
scholars of any quality in any discipline; cricket is no exception to that rule.
The national academy needs to plug in to the others dotting the countryside.
Coaching today has been turned into a cottage industry by former players, all
lobbying their respective state governments for land and facilities, setting up
their own little operations and doing their own thing irrespective. Which is
fine – but a national academy at the head of a loose confederacy of such private
enterprise could be the logical next step.