Transformational Sports
We look at the game differently
What if you played a mixed-gender sport for the first time? What if your coach was well-versed in the challenges of mixed-gender teams and had strategies to talk to players, parents and the community? What if the drills and activities were creatively designed so that people from different genders were paired at team practice so they could learn from and understand each other? What if tackling challenges together led to unexpected and unscripted friendships blossoming between people of different genders? What if these experiences changed the way you engaged with people who are different from you?
When we play the game differently, we view the world differently.
An Ultimate Reality
When I moved to Chennai, I discovered Ultimate Frisbee, the only sport in India at the time played with mixed-gender teams. This community became my second family and I spent much of my free time contributing to its growth. I joined one of India’s most diverse club teams with the majority of its players from underprivileged backgrounds. I became an assistant coach for India’s first under 20 men’s team where 90% of our players didn’t have a passport and had never travelled outside the country before. It showed me that sports can change a community. And it also revealed a passion of mine to work towards solving the gender inequity I was seeing and facing on a daily basis. I began organizing week-long immersion sports camps for teenagers and young adults to bridge gaps of gender and socio-economics. These were the beginnings of the non-profit I founded in 2016, Transformational Sports.
“Remember this. Hold on to this. This is the only perfection there is, the perfection of helping others. This is the only thing we can do that has any lasting meaning. This is why we’re here. To make each other feel safe.”
andre agassi in open
Transformational Sports
In 2016, I founded a non-profit organization called Transformational Sports that uses sports to engage with different communities on deep-rooted sociological and cultural perspectives based on gender. This includes developing and facilitating workshops for national-level sports teams, sports associations, colleges and schools; consulting with NGOs and educational institutions on bringing sports into their programs to develop life-skills among youth; creating a home-grown pan-Indian fellowship for young people to address gender inequality through sport; carrying out grants for the U.S. Consulate in Kolkata and Chennai; and training sports coaches on how to build strong mixed-gender teams.
