Since he founded the Burnaby Karate Academy in 1999, Sandeep Gill has become one of the sport’s elite coaches in Canada.

He was a provincial team coach for four years.Gill was named the Karate BC high performance coach of the year in 2008 and 2009, and then national coach of the year in 2010. His students have participated in world junior championships, karate world cups, the Pan American Games, Pan American karate championships and a Commonwealth championship.

His students’ results include a first-place finish by Melissa Chan and a third place by Isabel Chan at the 2016 World Cup in Croatia, Pan-American Games bronzes for Shaun Dhillon (2011, Mexico) and Jusleen Virk (2015, Toronto), who also won the 2008 Pan American junior championships in Santiago, Chile. Ten years later, Michael Plunkett won at the Pan American junior championships in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. There were also seventh-place finishes by Andrea Maikawa and Virk at the 2007 world junior championships in Turkey, and a fifth-place by Julia Maclean at the 2017 world juniors in Spain.

According to the academy, under Gill it has more trips to the podium at national championships than any other club in British Columbia with 86 gold medals and more than 150 silver and bronze medals as of 2021. In 2018, for example, it claimed 11 individual titles which was four more than Alberta, the fourth-place province.

The club also attracted many elite-level athletes from around the world to come to Burnaby to train and it gave Gill a lot of satisfaction to see many who had trained there — including Kalvis Kalnins of Latvia, American Tom Scott and Canada’s Daniel Gayzinsky — compete at the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2021.