Meet 3-time Dodgeball World Champion, Hwong Yie Hong. By day, Hwong is a Senior Engineer with Cat Energy & Transportation at Sime Darby Industrial based in Puchong, but after work, he is a national athlete who has won three gold medals for Malaysia.
Hwong, as part of the national men's dodgeball squad, recently won the gold medal at the 2022 World Dodgeball Championship in Edmonton, Canada. The team is currently the top-ranked dodgeball team in the world.
This feat could only be accomplished through all the sacrifices made by the team members. According to Hwong, one of the biggest challenges he faced was funding. As dodgeball is still not a well-known sport in Malaysia, all of the national dodgeball players are self-funded, and thus, they need to save as much as they can to play at a national level.
Hwong also spoke about the challenges of balancing work commitments and being a national dodgeball player. Time is as we all know, a tricky thing to balance, but with Hwong’s passion for the sport, he saw things through.
"I started playing dodgeball in my university days, and it has been almost 8 years now playing dodgeball professionally. It does get difficult as a lot of work happens outside the court with gym and personal training sessions, " he said, adding that he attributes the valuable experience from the years when training in Australia.