Over the past seven years since I quit the corporate world to promote a sports education company which now has a client base of over 75 K-12 schools across the country, in my interactions with school leaders, teachers and parents, Im often asked questions such as:• Why is sports education important? Shouldnt the focus of children be academics?
• My child is unlikely to pursue a career in sports. So, why should I send him to play?
I usually present them with a thought experiment. Lets imagine that all children will stop playing henceforth. They wake up to a mundane routine — go to school, come back home, do their homework, watch television, eat dinner, go to sleep. No play. No physical activity any day.
Doesnt sound desirable or practical, does it? At a very instinctive level, we know that children are born to play. Even if we cant logically justify that play is important for them, we instinctively know that it is.
However if you need facts and figures to justify the value of games and sports, here they are:
• Out of 4,028 children surveyed by Edusports across 21 high-end schools in 15 cities across India, 42 percent had disproportionate BMI (body mass index). Nineteen percent were overweight or obese and 23 percent were underweight
• Middle class India is raising a large number of children who will grow into unfit, unhealthy and low productivity adults
On the other hand, when you ask any successful individual questions such as: What makes you success-ful? very often, the answer you get is about life-skills like hard work, team work, leadership, dealing with failure, goal-setting, discipline. Academic achievement plays a small part in their lives.
If you persist and ask how they acquired these life skills, youll get a lot of sports-related answers. Because sports fields and games arenas are great life skills academies. For children all over the world play is natural, visceral, and for the most part fun, and playing fields are where most children want to be.
So, if we agree that kids should play, the next question is: Is sports as important as maths? Is it half as important? If it is half as important, are we spending half the time, energy, and focus, in ensuring that the play time of childrens lives receives adequate attention?
The next question why children play, highlights the need for paying adequate attention to sports education. Children play because they have fun. Not to remain healthy, or play for the country (not in the early years anyway). If they dont have fun, they dont want to play. Anyone who has spent even 30 minutes with a child will testify to this.
Through physical and sports education, children learn life skills and how to apply them by participating in organised competitive play. In the process they have fun, acquire knowledge, learn skills and develop healthy attitudes. All these elements are equally important. For example, if a child does not have knowledge of the rules, skills required to play (say, basketball), the right attitude to accept set-backs and reverses, then the game is more stress than fun. And over time, she starts switching off from the sport as other more naturally talented children, start playing better. Its like sending your child to an English elocution contest without teaching her basic spoken English.
Therefore, a sound sports education programme:
• Sets age-appropriate sports education standards, and helps to scientifically develop locomotive, manipulative and body management skills
• Provides age-appropriate equipment
• Includes all children, and not just those who are physically more active
• Adjusts to space available as most schools in India do not have acres of space
The greatest challenges confronting the introduction of well-developed sports programmes in educational institutions are:
• School managements dont give them the importance they deserve in terms of time, resources, training and top leadership focus
• Ill-qualified sports and PE teachers who are unwilling to change the practice of tossing a ball at a group of 40 kids and focusing on constituting a school team. They do very little to include all children
• Parents who believe that sports will hurt academic scores and wont be of any value when children grow up.
In my view, within the next decade there has to be a sea change in the attitudes of school managements, teachers and parents towards sports education. If not, India will not reap the demographic dividend of hosting the worlds largest child population. Instead it will become a nation of a billion-plus unfit, unhealthy losers sentenced to a lifetime of low productivity in the workplace and also-ran status in international games and sports arenas.

(Saumil Majmudar is promoter-director of EduSports, Bangalore)