This initiative was started by Shweta Singh in 2016, after her personal experience to bring quality, easily accessible sports facilities for her daughter closer to home. This is her story:
“There was a time during our childhood when our moms literally dragged us back from playtime as we refused to come home. But my daughter and many other children of her age and older were happy staying home with play stations, television, and laptops. It was not their fault, we carried phone /iPad everywhere to restaurants, malls, trips to ensure she is “engaged”. Never realized when these had taken over our (and especially my child’s) lives.
Everything has its repercussions. And it was not long before I saw my daughter resorting to aggression, avoiding going out and getting extremely restless without her iPad.
With a resolve to not let my daughter’s childhood be taken away from her, I decided in the summer of 2016 to engage her elsewhere. I started by enrolling her in a summer camp which covered mostly art activities.
While looking for more options I realized that most of the summer camps were around singing, art, soft skills, etc. There was not enough space at these institutes to leverage sports activities. As for sports academies, most of them had only 10 – 15 days camp of 1 hour every day. 1 hour commuting time, with only one-hour activity for such a brief duration, didn’t seem to be attractive enough to keep my child engaged. Not to mention their focus on only one sport/ activity at an exorbitant price.
So, I dug deeper to see if anyone.. anyone for that matter had taken such initiative, near or far. After all, every third parent seems to be facing this issue – lack of proper physical activities for their child closer to home in safe surroundings. And I thought it would be simple. But to my surprise, we did not have many options.
What was missing?????? Realized it was responsibility and accountability. Anything related to children needed more than address aggregators and no one was ready to take that extra step. So, 90% of children remained at home during vacation while only a few attended sports institutes.
And the answer was just around us. We had resources – every society has enough space to develop sufficient infrastructure for basic sports activities, extremely safe as it is within the comfort of home and within the vigilance of guardians, several trained coaches who can be efficiently channelized to deliver best results and a bunch of passionate volunteers (mostly parents) who wouldn’t mind spending 2 hours a week for the cause. It was only a matter of bringing them all together.
That’s what we did in the summer of 2017! The concept is simple. We introduced children to several activities within their society premises during the course of 30 to 40 days with 2hrs (or more) each day.
