The United States Sports Academy’s 2012 International Honorary Doctorate recipient and veteran Malaysian politician Muhyiddin Yassin was named that country’s prime minister this past Saturday (29 February).
Yassin earned the Academy’s 2012 International Honorary Doctorate in recognition of his efforts to build his nation’s youth sports programs. Yassin was the serving Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education and in that role directed the implementation of the “One Student – One Sport” initiative that aimed at fostering a vigorous sports program for the country’s youth.
The Academy conferred the honorary doctorate degree upon Yassin during his visit to Daphne, Ala., in 2013. During the course of his visit Yassin visited local educational institutions including the Daphne High School campus and met with students from the school’s international baccalaureate program.
Muhyiddin Yassin, the newly named Prime Minister of Malaysia, visited with students from Daphne High School’s international baccalaureate program during a visit to the area in 2013. The United States Sports Academy bestowed its 2012 International Honorary Doctorate upon Yassin during his visit.
The Academy has worked in Malaysia on various sport education initiatives since the early 1980s. The institution developed a master plan for sports development in the Malaysian state of Sabah in 1983 and provided a team of coaches to help with the state-wide sports effort. The Academy went on to teach its International Certification in Sports Coaching (ICSC) and International Certification in Sports Management (ICSM) programs for sports organizations at the municipal, state and levels over the ensuring decades. In 2012, the Academy began teaching its International Diploma in Physical Education and Sports Coaching (IDPESC) to more than 700 teachers in the country; a program that ran for the Ministry of Education until 2018.
Since its founding nearly a half-century ago, the Academy has leveraged its role and resources as a special mission sports university to make a global impact through quality sport instruction, research and service programs in 67 countries around the world. These contributions have varied in scope from the full-charge conduct of a nation’s entire national sport effort to individual coaching clinics, seminars, and symposia. For more about the Academy’s international programs, go to https://ussa.edu/international/.
