The whole sporting industry has managed to keep it all a very big mystery and all that we know as outsiders watching the sport or playing it at ground level is that sports consists of athletes, coaches, journalists, team managers.
And I am not saying these careers aren’t important. I am saying that the sports industry is far bigger and complex than what we traditionally see.
Have you ever met someone who was a journalist and a chief cricket correspondent at CNN-IBN and tournament director, FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup India? Well if you haven’t then the name you should be looking for is Roma Khanna. And a class with her made me question my own narrow assumption of the industry I want to be a part of.
Not trying to list out her CV here but Roma has done some great work that I didn’t even know was possible. Not to mention she did it when I was in middle school and while some of my peers were in diapers! All I want to know is HOW?
As a woman I still find it difficult to find a space in the industry because most of the conversation ends up being me proving which player I like, what biodata details I know about the player and the rules for understanding the game. Learning from her in our first week of class at AISTS INDIA, has left me curious and utterly amazed. I absolutely loved her first most important point she made about making her dream her reality. Hardwork and kindness. A lot of times the path we have built for ourselves feels greater than life and the steps to achieve feels so complex that you feel that you don’t have the skills it takes to make it happen. So an advice as simple as keep your head down and just take the first step and work hard and with kindness makes it at least feel easy. And according to me that’s half the battle won because I am no longer doubting myself.
My second biggest take away from the session was the 180 degree, if not 360 degree switch from being Chief Cricket Correspondent to pursuing a FIFA Master’s and working with the AIFF for 10 years. Until then I have only heard people saying “pick a sport and then do whatever,” but her decision makes so much sense because she took all her knowledge and experience about cricket, the most structurally successful sport in India and went to a sport that needed the impact.
Roma Khanna contributed significantly to the structuring of club licensing – an important step in funnelling talent, to heading venues and raising the infrastructure standards in order for us to be eligible to host FIFA TOURNAMENTS. All of which contributes directly in developing the sport in this country. All of us want to contribute to and develop our favourite sport. But here is someone who has actually walked the talk, and has done it in her own unique way.
And that perspective really helped me not be so strict or rigid in my own path. And be more open to at least trying, and not saying no to new opportunities that I wouldn’t have tried otherwise.
Roma represents a generation of women or people who entered and helped shape Indian sports when it was not even an industry. So it did definitely leave me thinking: what will the next generation see when they look at me.
I guess in the end the question isn’t “when we talk about building a career in sports what do we actually mean?”
The question is, what will we do with the path that those before us have created.
P.S. – You’d think as a big MS Dhoni fan, I’d be impressed to hear that he wrote Roma’s recommendation for the FIFA Masters. And somehow, that still wasn’t Roma’s biggest flex.
By Suprajha Rajan
