WOMANS HOCKEY: June 2008

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L N Mittal's ArcelorMittal to revive Jharkhand women's hockey team

L N Mittal's ArcelorMittal to revive Jharkhand women's hockey team
27 May, 2008, 0524 hrs IST, TNN

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JAMSHEDPUR: The huge success of SRK-starrer Chak De! India has perhaps induced the world’s biggest steel maker ArcelorMittal to get serious about hockey, which used to be the religion before cricket mania arrived.

At the outset, L N Mittal-controlled ArcelorMittal has set its sights on reviving the fortunes of the Jharkhand women’s hockey team. Interestingly, the move coincides with the company’s Rs 40,000 crore steel-related investment plans in Jharkhand, which are yet to take off.

ArcelorMittal’s immediate mission is to bail out the Jharkhand women’s hockey team and expand its alliance with the state leadership. After all, gone are the days when Jharkhand women made it to the national hockey side in droves. The present team has merely two representatives from the state.

“Jharkhand and women’s hockey go hand in hand and what better way than to help the cause of the game. We have successfully conducted the block level tournament and we have many more plans. But let us get the proposals and examine them. We will then decide how to proceed,” ArcelorMittal’s CSR manager (Jharkhand) Sumana Chakravarty Dutta told ET.

Recently, ArcelorMittal organised the first-ever block level women’s hockey tournament in the state’s Khunti and Gumla districts, sponsoring the entire event and distributing sport kits to the players. Around 12 teams from were selected, who fought it out among themselves for the top slots. Talented players picked at the grassroots level were selected by the state women’s hockey association for nurturing them further.

“Poor representation of state women in the national women’s hockey squad is no secret, which is why, we wish to nurture more state talent. We are thinking of giving the proposal for setting up a hockey academy which would have its own coach and state of the art infrastructure and help state eves hone their skills. There are even proposals of Mittal’s sponsoring the state team when they play national level tournaments,” said Jharkhand State Women’s Hockey Association (JSWHA) treasurer Suresh Kumar.

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Welcome to the premier site of women's hockey on the web! I am pleased to introduce the new home of the women's hockey web pages at www.whockey.com. These web pages were formerly part of Andria Hunter's homepage.

Hockey has always been my passion. I've been playing since I was 8 years old, at many different levels, including university hockey in the USA and in Canada, in the Swiss women's league, on the Canadian national team (92 and 94), and in the National Women's Hockey League (NWHL). I first started the Women's Hockey Web site in 1994. My motivation at that time was that there was no women's hockey information on the web at all. The web site has proven a fun way to give back to the sport I love!

Some of the information on this site is provided by the readers of this site. If you have any information to add, or corrections to make, don't hesitiate to send e-mail to andria@whockey.com, or to send a message through the women's hockey guestbook. Since having children, I haven't been making updates as regularly, but I'm planning to get back to it one day!

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-- Andria Hunter

ARGHYA GANGULY

Hockey women chucked, literally

ARGHYA GANGULY

TNN

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NEW DELHI, January 23: In the superhit Bollywood movie, Chak De! India , the Indian women's hockey team goes on to win the World Cup. Now, here's a reality check.

Members of the real national women's team, who recently returned from a tour of Australia, were forced to buy equipment out of their own money even as a Rs 5 lakh sports ministry grant for the purpose lay unused, with not one member of the team being told that such a fund existed.

The team members, who couldn't buy the kind of equipment they should be using at the international level because they didn't have enough money, were shocked when they landed at the sports ministry secretariat to receive individual cash awards.

There, the executive director of teams (SAI), Premchand Kashyap, asked the Indian Women's Hockey Federation secretary, Amrit Bose, in the presence of the team, whether the Rs 5 lakh was spent on the girls for their equipment.

The girls were shell-shocked. Had they known of this dedicated fund, they could have used it for buying equipment of international standard in Australia, the world leader in hockey equipment.

The players said they were even more surprised when Bose answered in the affirmative to Kashyap's question. The money had been "spent", she said. Bose later told TOI that the federation did received the grant but there was no need to spend the entire amount on equipment.