Challenges and opportunities through Khelo Rugby

Lovepreet Singh Gill describes his many adventures in Saraswatipur, Bengal, teaching rugby and other sports to young people with the Jungle Crows Foundation and Khelo Rugby programme.

My name is Lovepreet Singh Gill and I have lived my whole life in Kolkata. I started playing rugby more than three years ago at a winter camp organised by the Jungle Crows Foundation. I have really loved the time playing and training with my team - the Jungle Crows. The founder of our club is Paul Walsh who has also contributed to running the Khelo Rugby programme for children from disadvantaged communities. I am involved as a full-time coach in the programme, where I go to the communities to do rugby coaching and have some fun with the kids, while helping them to improve their daily life. I have also been involved in netball and I have been doing the same in schools while teaching netball. On Saturday morning, we also have our Rugby Academy sessions where children from all over come to learn the game of rugby. Having been involved with the Khelo Rugby project and Academy for a while, I received a fresh challenge from the foundation in October 2014.

Just shout; “Khello Khello”
I was selected to manage our Khelo Rugby programme in the North of Bengal in a very rural village called Saraswatipur. The nearest big town is Siliguri and that village was right in the middle of the jungle. The previous coaches were Sanu and Amirul, and as their time in the village was over, Paul requested that I do some work there.

The three and a half months that I was there were amazing and I found many really talented children. Not only in rugby, but even in other activities like dancing, football, volleyball etc. The children were very enthusiastic and they were really good at learning new games. Importantly, girls in Saraswatipur are able to participate in rugby which is often not available to their sisters in the town. The senior girls’ team were already very good at the game with credit going to Sanu and Amirul who made it possible through their hard work for these girls to enjoy playing rugby. I didn’t have too many difficulties while coaching them because all the boys and the girls were listening to each and every thing throughout my coaching sessions.

Victory for the girls
When I heard that the All India Under 19 girls 7’s tournament was coming up, myself and Sukumar (who joined me for a month to help in the programme delivery) had planned to do plenty of preparatory training sessions with the girls – using drills, developing their fitness and working on their other weaknesses. The girls worked very hard and came runners-up in the All India tournament. On that day I felt really proud that I was able to coach a group of such talented girls, and to win in only their second tournament was indeed a great achievement for them.

This article is a shortened version of a longer blog posting.