IndianFootball.Com guest columns: Bangalore: The Growth of Football in India's Hi-Tech Capital

IndianFootball.Com guest columns: TOM LEGG

Bangalore: The Growth of Football in India's Hi-Tech Capital

Driving a car through Bangalore is difficult at the best of times. In this teeming city, the ratio of cars to motorbikes is roughly ten to one in favour of the bikes. And it is this imbalance which challenges your driving skills to the limits. Sit up and beg style bikes weave around you in different and seemingly impossible angles leaving you sweating profusely at the wheel of your car, in fear of running one of these mad motorcyclists over.
We are heading for the tranquil surroundings of the SPT Sports grounds, situated roughly fifteen kilometres from the hustle and bustle of Bangalore, in the Koramangla district of the city. This sports academy has been building a healthy reputation over the past eight years, as the leader in football development in Bangalore and the state of Karnataka.

The driving force behind SPT is its founder and CEO Amit Saran. His goal is not only to increase the popularity of the world's number one sport in India, for players and supporters, but also to improve the grass roots system, for young people, which so far has been hopelessly neglected by the countries governing body.

The first step towards these goals was taken in February 1998 when an inter-school tournament took place in Bangalore, between schools from within the state of Karnataka. The tournament was held in the grounds of a local military academy, where the playing surface, concrete hard, had about as much grass as Stamford Bridge during the winter! This combination, as you can imagine, made it very difficult for even the best of players to keep the ball under control as it bobbled and bounced here-there-and-everywhere. But despite these challenging playing conditions the tournament drew an impressive 14 entries from schools with teams organised into three age brackets; under-12's, under-14's and under-16's.
Year on year, since its inauguration in 1998, the popularity and reputation of the tournament has grown. This was highlighted no better by a record 40 schools entering teams last year. And it looks like this record will be surpassed this year. In recent years the tournament has toured other cities in the state, such as Mysore, with the aim of increasing the popularity of the sport, providing a competitive outlet for the local footballing communities and allowing SPT Sports coaching staff to spot possible talent to be trained at the academy.

In year 2000 SPT Sports launched the first ever corporate five-a-side tournament in Karnataka. The list of multinational companies who entered teams makes for impressive reading; Hewlett Packard, Cambridge Asia, Ernst and Young, HSBC, ING, Siemens, Tesco, The Times of India and Yahoo. Since then it has become a hotly contested annual event. Billed as the Kingfisher Tournament, it acts as a great chance for multinational companies to face off against one other and it helps to increases the interest levels of the game throughout the city and the state.

A vital component of the future success of football here in India, over the next ten years, will be the influence of parents on their children. Due to the current parlous state of the professional game in the country, parents actively deter their children from pursuing a career in football, preferring to guide them towards more respectable areas of society e.g. engineering, health care and law!
And who can blame them when you look at the football facts here; salaries in the National League are relatively low, geared overly towards performance and so putting immense strain on the player's health. Job security is poor, with the majority of players on one year contracts who in turn have no option but to uproot their families year after year to find a new club. Unless these low salaries and insecurities are addressed quickly professional football in India cannot and will not progress significantly. There is hope though. If the governing bodies are able to present a well organised league system and improve the general working conditions of its players, it will result in parents feeling more comfortable about encouraging their children to pursue a future in the game. It will also depend on how these officials react to the cries from the grass roots' footballing community.

For the past eight years SPT Sports has run a summer camp for the children of Bangalore. Children attend from April to May and take part in football coaching sessions that not only provide them with the chance to improve their technical skills, but also allow them to enjoy themselves in a footballing environment.
Then there is a group of 25 students who attend SPT on a regular basis during the week. They range in age from five to fifteen and although the football activities are recreational, there is the hope that in the future the academy will be able to produce several competitive youth teams who will play local, national and even international opponents.

I have been working at the academy for just over a month now, and with the help of my fellow coaches have taken some steps towards achieving these ambitious goals. We have been able to structure the coaching program, with every session now planned, evaluated and logged by coaches, who then sit down together and decide on appropriate activities and skills' training that each group will benefit from in up-coming sessions. Our coaching program will benefit furthermore from the introduction of an appraisal system that will monitor the standards of coaching at the academy. Every coach will be given an individual performance feedback session, at the end of every month, that covers areas of success and areas for improvement.
On February 24, 2007 we launched of the first ever SPT Football Coaches' Course. It will be spread over three weekends, with the participants gaining valuable theoretical and practical knowledge to take back to their respective schools and clubs. Feedback from the inaugural session was positive and there are already plans to run a follow up course, with help from some of the ex-professionals and P.E. teachers that have enlisted for the current course.

The next six months at SPT will see more initiatives introduced to help increase the popularity of the game and its grass roots' development in the state.
Summer Camps will benefit from a structured coaching program and from the introduction of visual learning sessions for the children. Videos clips of European matches will be shown and explained by the coaches and the children will be encouraged to try out some of the skills they've seen and will, hopefully acquire some new role models in the sport.

During May we plan to introduce one of the greatest British football pastimes to Bangalore, the Pub League. Local bars and pubs will get the chance to enter their own team into a competition that will keep the same league structure we see in England. This competition will not only provide an enjoyable outlet for its participants, but should create healthy competition and further increase the popularity of the game.
The goals set out by SPT Sports will not be achieved easily, though. The reason for this is simple; in England and the rest of the footballing world, football is THE mainstream amateur and professional sport for the middle class, where any available land big enough to accommodate two sets of goal posts - makeshift or manufactured - is maximized by children and adults to play the beautiful game. In India, this level of popularity is reserved strictly for cricket. Cleared scrub land, quiet public roads, town squares, dusty car parks, school playing fields, etc, play host to the rawest equivalent of the leather and willow game; with empty tin cans stacked neatly on top of each other for stumps, battered tennis balls that look as though they were left behind by the British Raj and a discarded planks of wood for bats.

What SPT Sports does though, is to offer hope for the underprivileged and unrepresented footballing community in India, that one day our beautiful game will prosper in their vast and diverse country.

[ indianfootball.com guest column ]