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Residential hockey centre of excellence to come up in Lucknow
Union sports ministry picked Uttar Pradesh, which has a rich history in the game. The state authorities had also offered to run centres for athletics and badminton.
A centre of excellence in hockey will be set up in the Uttar Pradesh capital soon. The union sports ministry, with support from the state government, has taken the decision to nurture talent in a state which produced hockey stalwarts Dhyan Chand and Kunwar Digvijay Singh ‘Babu’ and has a rich history in the game.
A 100-bed hostel for boys and girls, modern sports medicine and physiotherapy centres as well as top coaches would be part of the centre to come up at the state government-run Padma Shri Mohd Shahid Synthetic Stadium.
The union sports ministry will fund the centre at a venue that already has facilities for hockey, tennis, badminton and squash. The Uttar Pradesh Sports Directorate will run it in consultation with Uttar Pradesh Hockey.
“We’re in the process of starting the construction of the hostel; we already have a flood-lit hockey stadium there since the 2016 Junior Men’s Hockey World Cup in Lucknow,” UP director-sports, RP Singh, said on Friday.
“This would be the first advanced excellence centre for hockey in the state where players, who have already appeared at the nationals, would be admitted for advance training,” he said. “We have plans to accommodate 100 players, including 50 girls, at the centre.”
The plan was approved a few months ago at a meeting of sports ministers, sports directors and authorities of the union sports ministry and Sports Authority of India. Each state was asked to adopt at least three from a list of 14 disciplines.
“We chose hockey, athletics and badminton. We got sanction for hockey first,” said Singh, who is also secretary of Uttar Pradesh Hockey.
Uttar Pradesh has also produced hockey Olympians Mohd Shahid, Zafar Iqbal, Ashok Kumar, MP Singh, Jagbir Singh, Sujeet Kumar, Abdul Aziz, Shakeel Ahmed, Mohd Arif, Sanjay Bisht, Vivek Singh, Syed Ali, Ravinderpal Singh, Rajneesh Mishra, RP Singh, Devesh Chauhan and Danish Mujtaba.
The Uttar Pradesh Sports Directorate also plans to start centres of excellence in athletics and badminton, at the Guru Gobind Singh Sports College in Lucknow.
“Once, we have all three centres running properly we will have a vast pool of talent. I wish to see them as feeders to the Indian teams for international events like Olympics, Asian Games, Commonwealth Games and World Championships,” said Singh, head of Hockey India’s high-performance committee.
