https://givemehockey.com/gd-topic-how-to-promote-indian-hockey/ The Home of Field hockey Thu, 17 Mar 2011 07:32:29 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.1 https://givemehockey.com/gd-topic-how-to-promote-indian-hockey/#comment-143 Thu, 17 Mar 2011 07:32:29 +0000 https://givemehockey.com/gd-topic-how-to-promote-indian-hockey/#comment-143 I am Andrea from Germany and I am running a hockey village in India. I am a hockey player myself and for me it is extremely frustrating and sad what is going on with Indian Hockey…
Your country lost the sports spirit – it is all about politics…
Still 75% of India is rural area – means farmers. They are busy with earning their daily bread and butter. So why should they think of sports or even hockey? It is easier to grap a stick from somewhere and play cricket – you need just one stick and a ball and you can entertain 20 kids… where to get 20 hockey sticks from???
Second thing is that in the whole of India you have as much hockey turfs as one good hockey club in the Netherlands… so there is a big lack of facilities… even if you find a turf to play – the next one is probably 600km away – so how to do a test match??? Then you have to pay a huge amount of money to play for an hour on that turf (I experienced that many times already when I came over with hockey groups from Germany)…
And of course it is a lack of education – parents would rather allow their children to play cricket because there might be a chance to get rich then waisting their time with hockey…
Please have a look on my website http://www.hockeyvillageindia.com we are working hard to make the kids play hockey – in this case it works because the children don't have anything else to do and we built a sports ground for them as well as an english school.
But you are totally right – it has to start in the schools…
In Germany kids start playing already at the age of 5 or 6… – the earlier the better!
Maybe we can do something together – I would love to!!!
Andrea

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