Welcome to Equalsportz, a digital platform dedicated to helping children discover, learn, and excel in their sporting journeys.
My 9 year old daughter is an aspiring athlete and in our journey I engage with many other young athletes and parents. Equalsportz platform emerged from my own journey as a parent, our needs, questions & predicaments, and from conversations with these young athletes and their parents. It emerged from my personal experiences and conversations with these families.
India has aspirations to become a sporting superpower. That journey can only be accomplished if more children adopt sports early, stay in sports longer, and their learning journeys are more structured and streamlined.
Some initial working around numbers in the segment suggest that parents of kids between 5-14 years (NCCS A/B) in top 10 Indian cities, are spending over INR 5000 crores on sports coaching and yet there are several gaps:
Parents are one of the most key stakeholders in the early journey of athletes and arguably the least engaged stakeholder in the ecosystem. They need guidance, resources and collaborations, but are often discovering answers through informal, unstructured conversations with other parents, coaches, teachers at every level of the athletic journey:
- When should a child be introduced to a sport?
- Which sport should they choose, and why?
- Should sport be a recreational activity or a career, and who decides, and when?
- Is early specialisation beneficial, or is it better to wait?
- How can we balance academics and sporting dreams?
- What does it take to become an elite athlete?
- How can we explore sport-related careers beyond becoming an athlete?
These are some important questions that everyone is seeking answers for. I found that knowledge resources exist, but are disaggregated across different spaces – from parent whatsapp groups (if you are lucky to be among the 1024 ones allowed!), to coaches, or parents that you bump into occasionally at tournaments. Every time we move from one stage to the next, on the journey, there isn’t a clear roadmap of what lies ahead.
Access to information is not evenly distributed among all parents and we are recreating the wheel over and over everyday. Through our own struggles I felt it would be super helpful to have easy access to a resource bank, best practices and learnings curated with inputs from coaches, experts, other parents, who through their own journeys had it figured out, and from which we could all benefit.
Similarly I found that there are many learning opportunities in the form of specialised training sessions, workshops, and clinics are constantly happening, but the information is scattered and not available to everyone at one location. Ditto for sport related education.
Aggregation, we believe, will benefit everyone involved – our young athletes, parents, coaches and academies.
Lastly I found that fulfilment or enablement of sporting offerings, say something as simple as signing up for a workshop or a tournament, is fraught with friction involving multiple steps and back-forth. From initial communication received on WhatsApp (if one is signed up to the relevant group) to payment sent on UPI, again to be confirmed to organisers on WhatsApp and a final confirmation received, two days later. That’s not how we even buy groceries today. Why then sport? Why not make it simpler, easier, efficient and effective for everyone. This is what we will attempt to do.
We aim to inspire, educate and enable the journeys of our next-generation of athletes.
Over time, we aspire to create India’s largest digital first platform for sports news, information, celebration, guidance, career direction for the next-generation athlete:
Aggregate to become a single destination for everything sport for parents, children, young athletes
- Create digital Assets – to answer sport specific questions
- Host workshops – around career direction, sports psychology, improving technique
- Education – careers in sport related opportunities
- Online Bookings – think bookmyshow for sport (learn and play)
- Create better reach for academies and coaches to audience across the country for
specialised offerings
In the coming months, we have lined up a bunch of initiatives, hoping to bring some of our vision to reality.
First up, Raising An Athlete, a podcast series, and a primer for parents and their children on a sporting journey.
Stay tuned.
