Organizing sports at schools and colleges

Manglal Chongloi *

5th Inter Children Home Sports Meet 2012 at Khuman Lampak Sports Complex :: pix - Arun Thongam

Games and sports is one of the extra-curricular activities of a school or college curriculum. It is an indispensable activity of every educational institution. It is indispensable in the sense – sport is a part of play; and, the inborn play nature of a child and the sports are inextricably link with each other. Without games and sports, school or college education will go handicap.

As such, schools and colleges organize sports obligatorily once or more as per the school academic programme in a calendar year. It is a momentum duration of joy and jubilation; and an enthusiastically awaited relaxing time interval from toils of boring bookish engrossment and endless tiresome homework at school and at home respectively. So, organizing sports at schools and colleges is as important as that of class activity.

To continue with, our School/College sports meet began amidst heavy rain on the 23rd Sept 2014. The zeal and interest of the students in play and sports forcibly let flow the already arranged programme with much enthusiasm and noise of joy that the opening volley ball match began under the thunder of heavy rain; and the match was applauded by the audience, particularly the audience of the two houses that played the match, at the top of their voice that rent the air.

The programme continued to proceed for the day. At the end part of the day, the rain, fortunately, subsided, showing a sign of fine weather in the future. The next and the following days, as been expected, the weather continued to be finely gifted by nature and the sports week 2014 flew smoothly till the concluding day of the 29th Sept 2014 with a cheering success.

Our school/college sports came rolling on with both group items- such as volley ball, khokho, kabaddi; and individual items, such as, high jump, long jump- shot-put, races etc., and the students were divided into four different coloured houses-Red, blue, green and yellow. All the sports items were competed with fierceness and intensity in favour of the houses for which they were played that all the games drew an untwinkling eye balling spectacles.

School/College sports meet plays a vital role in identifying the many sports talented students that it paves the way for choosing a career in sports if one wishes so. So, school/college provides a wonderful opportunity and platform for the students to diagnose their talents in various disciplines of games and sports. It is so important that even the Council of Higher Secondary Education, Manipur has made it obligatory that all the schools/colleges, that are under its recognition, should conduct or organize games and sports at least once a year each, as an activity of co-scholastic area, which carries 5% marks weightage of 20% of internal assessment aggregate of 100 marks.

As has been mentioned earlier, sports means play. So it gives a great privilege for the teachers to study the students' temper and their reactions with the fellow beings while in play that it helped them diagnose their associative psychologies with the outside world. On top of this, teachers could understand students who love sports and who don’t, and so could categorically segregate students into groups of sportsmanship and none sportsmanship.

From such understanding, teachers could adopt different strategies of imparting educations to the students as per their talents and interest. As for us, to fill up the lapse of participating activities during sports meet, we also organize literary competitions on various items-such as, debate, extempore speech, essay writing, quiz, painting, singing etc in which different students who are not sports talented, took part and exposed their intellectual abilities, that it added completion and success to the sports week.

A school/College sport helps inculcate admirable discipline, and undeniably helps develop a sense of obedience to the rules and submissiveness to leadership. Some able students are also given a chance of leadership exercise and thus help to develop leadership qualities. Through participation in the sports, a student develops a sense of unity, competition and games spirit. He is able to learn that success is possible through obedience to rules and cooperative efforts of all the team members. Moreover, he learned different rules of different games that he is confident to play the game even outside.

Now a days, sports is very much job/career oriented too. With the current understanding of these opportunities, flowing within the societies of sports, the school administration should encourage different sports talented students to take interest and take part in the sports with an objective to become eminent sports personalities of the country as others do, and should also help develop their talents for the future prospectively hovering privileges offered by the government as well as many recognized clubs, especially, in the field of football.

Special job positions are created in the government offices for the distinguished sports personalities in the country. To develop the sense of true competition and undergo a career leading sports, it is the school atmosphere which should provide opportunities to sow the seed of interest and career building in particular games. Therefore, organizing school / college sports is inevitably necessaryand is legitimate right of a student to have it.

Finally, organizing sports helps students realize the importance of health. Because, sport is meant only for the healthy persons. Sports teach a student that health is achieved through healthy way of living and consuming good and hygienic food only –contributing towards healthy India. In addition, sports give a valuable lesson of peace and peaceful coexistence. Because, games could not be played amidst war or violence.

So sports help propagate the message of peace, love and unity amongst the people irrespective of caste, creed, colour and language. Therefore school atmosphere must create sufficient room for developing sportsmanship of its talented sports students who could bring glory to the nation in the field sports.