Neha Sahu & Vikas Plakkot

The origin of Just For Kicks lies within a Teach For India classroom. As a group of fellows, we were consistently struggling to develop long-term character traits of our children within the walls of a classroom. In an effort to find solutions to this problem, we experimented with the idea of using a sport like football. In no time, the attendance rates skyrocketed, children began to display a lot more confidence, it became easy to communicate with them as teachers due to the out-of-classroom bond, and they also began working collaboratively as one unit. Just For Kicks wouldn’t have taken birth had we not had the first-hand experience of the problems faced by children attending under-resourced schools.

While these changes were at the core of why we started Just For Kicks, it was not until an incident in early 2012 that we began perceiving this as a serious project. One of my students, Sayaji who was all of 8, arrived very early on a Sunday morning to play a local league game we had organised as part of the program. None of the other students had turned up yet but Sayaji was there, all decked up and ready to play. He was unusually silent but went about warming up and even helped me prepare the pitch . A while later, there was a commotion outside the school. It was Sayaji’s family members who had come to question why Sayaji was in school at such a ‘grave’ time. It was only at that point I realised that Sayaji had lost his father just a couple of hours before. I went up to Sayaji in complete shock and told him he needs to go home to be with his family. But he looked up at me firmly and said “Bhaiya mujhe khelna hai, please khelne do! (Bhaiya, I want to play, just let me!)”. I let him play and he expressed himself freely on the pitch taking the team to a victory. It was as if he forgot all his worries on the pitch. This truly testified our belief in the project.

All our initial expansion was also driven through the Teach For India network as we gathered interested fellows to run the program within their schools by themselves. We wouldn’t have become a full-fledged organisation had it not been for the initial support the network provided us in proving the concept of our project and taking it to new schools and locations.