Quite often, when athletes call it a day, they enter into coaching or broadcasting or find a way to be associated with the sport in one way or another. Former India cricketer Jatin Paranjape, after retiring, ventured into a different route, joining a major sporting brand as sports marketing head. It was during his time with them in the Netherlands, aggregation sites got his attention. And when he left that organisation, the former India cricketer decided to find his own way of being involved with sports while also giving back to the community.
That, along with the personal experience of struggling to schedule tennis coaching lessons for his kids at a club in his neighbourhood, pushed him to create an online platform where parents can look for coaches, participants can book venues. "If you bring all the venues, all the coaches on one platform, where it's easy for parents and participants to discover information and also to book accordingly. So that was the genesis," Paranjape, who founded Khelomore, an online sports booking platform, in early 2017 tells this daily.
While initially, there were challenges such as getting the venue owners to enlist and make their inventory available to the general public, almost seven years on, the venture has expanded across the country, including cities like Bengaluru, New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Surat, Vadodara and Nagpur with about 2000 venues to book from. The tech platform provides avenues to book coaches, venues and upcoming sporting events that people can register and take part in. They have collaborated with Cricket Victoria to launch the Melbourne Cricket Academy in Mumbai, have partnered with World Pickleball League, which is one of the fastest growing sports.
"Cricket is so big in India, but the coaching part of cricket is not being done very well. Because you have very few coaches who are certified and the coaching methodology is not standardised. Cricket Victoria met us and we saw that their entire methodology for foundational level coaching and intermediate level coaching is really nicely laid out. We have partnered with them to certify coaches across India, basically. We have basically licensed their curriculum out where we do three or four 4 face-to-face level 1 coaching courses across the country. Each course has a batch of about 20 to 30 coaches. They are all given certifications and they are given a content management system which gives them the latest drills to do, ways to keep players engaged," the former India selector explains.
When it comes to pickleball, they have positioned it as a recreational activity. With the explosive growth the sport is seeing in India, the platform partnered with All India Pickleball Association to provide coaches who can teach about the basics of the game. "Every day we are seeing more and more venues being on-boarded. We organise pickleball days at all our venues where a coach from the AIPA goes to that group of participants, teaches them the rules, teaches them the basic techniques of the game. It ends with a nice fun tournament which we do with our venues as well. Pickleball days are proving to be very popular. These pickleball days are just `99 basically. We've done more than two and a half, three thousand bookings just over the last couple of months for these pickleball days," says Paranjape who is a member of the BCCI Cricket Advisory Committee.
While the platform has facilitated the booking of venues and coaches for up and coming generations, at the core of it is the idea of bringing people together for sport. "We are seeing the birth of thousands of communities around sport right now. It will aggregate venues, players, communities, coaches and sellers as well from an e-commerce perspective. We are spending a lot of time with communities. We just want to make it very easy for these communities to also connect with each other through this tech platform which we have built," he signs off.
