Biggest Grass Root Level Sports Tournaments in India

Explaining and talking about the need of a good grass root level structure to improve sports in the country is like stating the Earth revolves around the sun, or that the sun is stationary, or that we live in the Milky Way Galaxy. All of it is pretty obvious to everyone and there’s hardly any need to explain anything like this.

Many big firms like Coca-Cola, StarSports and others realised the potential at the grass root levels in India and organised some of the greatest and biggest grass root sports tournaments in the country.

We, at EssentiallySports, take a look at the some of the biggest grass root sports tournament organised in the country.

The Coca-Cola Cup was held from 1993-2003 and was a grassroots talent hunt initiated to uncover the most dynamic young footballers in the country and identify potential players for the National Under-16 Sub Junior Football Team. The AIFF (All India Football Federation) technical committee were to shortlist 40 players from the tournament for the National Under-16 football squad. 41,000 young footballers competed for several months in district, state and Zonal levels to qualify for the national finals. These footballers who took part in the event were from 2610 schools and across 86 cities.

Sports Icons like Sachin Tendulkar and Sunil Chhetri facilitated the winners in the tournament.

This tournament was organised by Coca-Cola in partnership with Procam International and the IPL Franchise Mumbai Indians. The whole tournament was organised under the mentorship of former Indian Wicket keeper Saba Karim. The matches were played in Azad Maidan and Cross Maidan in Mumbai.

The tournament involved over 200 days of cricketing action over a period of 9 months in 65 districts in 8 states and 2 centers, under the aegis of the respective State Cricket Associations.The Coca-Cola Cup turned out to be the largest Inter-School Cricket championship in India and involved participation from over 11,000 young crickets from 700 schools.

This was a tournament organised by HCL in partnership with Mahesh Bhupati Tennis Academies in Delhi from 27th July to 2nd August. More than 70 schools from Delhi NCR took part in the event. The tournament involved U-17 individual event for both boys and girls and U-15 team event and was played in DLTA Tennis Courts, Safdarjung Enclave, New Delhi.

Similarly, to promote the raw talent that India possesses in Sports(read Cricket), Wonder Cements in Rajasthan would be organising one such tournament called as ‘Wonder Cement Saath:7 Cricket Mahotsav’ and would be launching the event on Tuesday, 3rd November, 2015. The event aims at promoting and unleashing the hidden talent in Rajasthan through district level and state level tournaments. Legendary Cricketer Kapil Dev would be the chief guest at the launch which takes place in Jaipur Marriot Hotel in Jaipur tomorrow.

The tournament till now has around 4000 teams participating in it and around 40000 players representing them. The winning prize the event is a whopping Rs 30 Lakhs. The event will target around 200 villages in Rajasthan and would involve teams of 7 players. All other rules and regulations will be out tomorrow when the event is launched. (For details, visit: http://saath7.wondercement.com/)

We hope like the other four events, it turns out to be a great success and becomes one of the biggest grass-root level tournaments in India.