Building a sports culture

When you’re talking about strict schedules, Indian School of Business (ISB) can’t be far behind. And for the students of ISB, sports acts as a stress buster. Talking about it, the sports club president Arnab Adak says, “We organise various events for the students. There are two aims — to make them aware about physical fitness and it also works as a team bonding exercise. ISB has world class facilities for sports and you usually spot students there. There’s one sport which is famous as ISB’s sport — ultimate frisbee. It’s like American rugby, but with a frisbee. These sports activities start around 9 pm and go on till 2 am every day. We even had a martial arts expert fly down from Delhi to give self defense classes to girls and boys.”

And all of this is apart from the ISB Super League — ISB’s version of the IPL, which teaches them sports management. “We have four teams which consists of national-level players. From the given resources, we build a team and hold the tournaments,” says Arnab, who is a state-level basketball player and athlete. CBIT too conducts a tournament Aura that is associated with Osmania University and sees participation from over 70 colleges.

Meanwhile, IIIT-H students say they can have more when it comes to sports infrastructure but still, they have a good sports programme. “We are entitled to three days per semester to play in tournaments and are given daily travel and food allowance for them. There are no restrictions when it comes to practice. We have coaches for football, hockey, basketball, volleyball and athletics. In the first year, its compulsory for students to go for one hour Physical Training and yoga sessions and there are also credits for it.

We also organise tournaments where we invite all colleges from the state and also have a weekend dedicated to sports,” says Abhinav Shukla, a fourth-year student who’s also a member of IIIT-H football team. Anjali Shenoy, a national-level badminton player from IIIT-H says, “We have two badminton events in the year. Being a player, I have to travel and we have a policy by which we are compensated for the missed classes.”

But this matters most to students who are professionally into sports. For badminton ace P.V. Sindhu, who was a student at St Ann’s college, the college went out of its way to support her. “She never used to attend classes. They would organise special classes for her. Also, when she had to go for the Padmashree Award, it clashed with her exam but the University helped her out,” says P. Vijaya, Sindhu’s mom.