Sports For All - India’s biggest Youth Sports Championship - is back again and is expected to hit the ground running. Encouraged by its success of the past two years, SFA will go all out this season and has set a target of attracting 50,000 kids from 850 schools just in Mumbai. They are coming up with various ways to make this competition the most aspirational platform for the athletes.
SFA has been making immense efforts towards radicalising the way inter-school sport is played. In their quest to provide a truly professional platform for athletes, they want to make the stage bigger and grander in the near future by encompassing more than one million athletes under their tutelage.
“Our platform is completely ready (digitally and on-ground) to be scaled up beyond Mumbai too. We have invested a lot of effort - heart, soul and money such that the platform is now completely ready even for sponsors and strategic partners to take this Pan India. We have firm and concrete plans to be present in 8 cities in the near future, thereby bringing the best 1 Million athletes across India in 35+ sporting disciplines on a single platform,” says Rishikesh Joshi, the brain behind SFA.
To take you through the journey
What started off as a dream in 2015 by Rishikesh Joshi, now stands as the largest Professional school level sporting event in the country and it is a global innovation. SFA was started with the idea of unearthing talent at the grass roots level.
SFA aspires to make India proud by way of taking the lead in radicalising inter-school sport. They have ensured every athlete gets a level playing field along with all the facilities required to turn amateur school level athletes to professional athletes while giving the aspirants a holistic and transparent platform to do so.
“We have ensured state-of-art infrastructure to every single sport, along with perfect scheduling, digital scoring & HD Match Videography for every sport. We have also involved professional sport operators, associations & federations. In fact close to 1300+ technical officials were involved during last year's SFA championship and every single match has been professionally video recorded (11,000 matches in 2016) alongside the statistics and records of every athlete being captured and linked to individual player profiles on our website, www.sfanow.in,” Rishikesh said.
However, it has not been an easy journey for SFA, When they took off in their first year, it took a lot more than just hard work to achieve this dream. It was their determination, a set of like-minded and passionate team members, the ability to stay positive when the chips were down and an immense amount of guts and belief to ensure that this revolutionary concept succeed.
“Initially when we started, it was very difficult for us to even convince the schools about what it is that they were going to benefit from SFA as they thought it was just another sports competition. We faced a number of hurdles in our journey and it took my team a lot of hard work and perseverance to successfully achieve what we had set out to accomplish. The second season was relatively a little easy as we could achieve what we had promised in year 1 and it automatically paved the path for us. The word of mouth has been so positive and the students, coaches, authorities alike have shown immense faith in us," said Rishikesh, the former Mumbai Indians administrator.
Participation wasn’t the only challenge they faced. Replicating an Olympic institution which included providing state of the art infrastructure, a fair ranking system along with a digital platform which seamlessly integrated an athlete’s on-field performance online required generation of funds.
SFA started off as a bootstrapped company on Rishikesh’s personal savings in the first year with Enerzal coming on board as the Energy Drink Partners. Year two saw SFA being trusted by two more sponsors as Tata Motors and Honor Mobiles came on board. Together these brands knew they were on the right track and purpose to achieve their common goal of promoting and uplifting grassroots sports with a long-term vision and genuine intent.
With ambitions soaring high and with a focussed, smart and professional approach they aim to introduce a system which still remains untouched and a sphere absolutely isolated for top level athletes of the country too, by making it possible for the athletes participating in SFA to access and assess themselves by looking at professionally captured videos of all the matches being played in this Olympic Style Tournament for Schools.
These videos will also be made available towards online talent scouting, opening up a new aspect to scouting which is completely non-existent in the country let alone school sports. SFA with their revolutionary ideas and the right approach are trying to pave the way for the future of Indian athletes starting at the grassroots level.
