Long Live the Coach

Long Live the Coach is a long sports-competition novel by Guoguan Zhanjiang, following his All-Around Athlete. It was serialized on Qidian from May 2017 to January 2019, runs about 1.93 million Chinese characters in more than six hundred chapters, and is complete. The protagonist, Li Dai, is a recent graduate in sports training who was preparing to take an exam for a job, but a "coach system" that suddenly appears in his mind makes him miss the exam and lose the job opportunity. The system, which calls itself the "Guide," can identify athletes' abilities and talents, provide targeted training plans, and comes with various auxiliary means. Li Dai therefore starts from the most basic level, a PE exam tutoring class, and gains a foothold through scientific training methods and one unexpected result after another; he then enters a sports school, obtains a formal post, and is hired as a strength and conditioning coach for a weightlifting team, helping veteran athletes, injured world champions and talented prospects whose gifts were buried return to competition. As he rises step by step from "third-rate coach," his stage expands from grassroots training grounds to provincial teams, the national team and international events, covering track and field, weightlifting, basketball, boxing and other sports. The novel approaches competitive sport from the perspective of a coach rather than an athlete, placing talent identification, conditioning, injury rehabilitation and psychological adjustment at the heart of the story, adding a professional dimension beyond the usual system-flow conventions.