Reviving the sports culture

KARACHI: Except from cricket, and perhaps, a few other sports like football and hockey, no other game has a future in Pakistan. Sports such as basketball or tennis, although played at inter-school level in some cities, lack proper facilities and equipment needed to play them as well as trained coaches. This is why they are less encouraged and students who want to participate in these sports have to resort to playing cricket or football instead. This is not to say that these sports are bad, but every game brings with it its own sets of discipline that helps players in their daily lives as well, such as building patience in cricket and fostering the team spirit in basketball.

While many developing countries, including India, are spending on their youth by creating new opportunities for them through sports participation, our youth is either engulfed under piles of books or made to practise yoga in the name of physical education classes. On the other hand, summer camps are seeing a decline in the number of students enrolling for the programme.

Few years ago, summer camps set up in most schools itself gave students the opportunity to participate in different sports. But owing to the, unfortunate, decline in their admissions, some schools have either completely done away with them or stuck to offering mainstream sports and little recreational activities. This is one of the reasons, we now find ourselves surrounded by a youth who is easy to be radicalised by just a click of a finger, as they spend most of their time online.

Before we lose our youth to the menace of extremism and terrorism, it is time we gave our future generation an environment where they can flourish and discover themselves through the endless opportunities that the world of sports has to offer.

Naeem Ghouri

Published in The Express Tribune, June 8^th, 2017.

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