This lawyer and football coach is a gamechanger for her community

Every day, over 200 children from 20 slums of Vyasarpadi in North Chennai wake up at the crack of dawn, change into track pants and sneakers, and leave their homes groggy and unkempt—to play football. 

Their lethargy, however, doesn’t cross the gates of the Slum Children Sports Talent Education Development Society football turf, where their coach, J Shaktheeshwari, awaits them day after day. 

“Any of these children could be a national champion in the making,” she says. “But, before that, they come here to become the first generation of educated, informed and radical citizens within their families of hereditarily oppressed people.” 

Shaktheeshwari’s isn’t being presumptuous with a claim like that. She’s talking from lived experience. As the fifth of six children born to daily wage labourers, the 30-year-old grew up in these very by-lanes of Vyasarpadi and became the only girl in her family to have finished college (B.Com) and the first woman in her neighbourhood to become a lawyer at the Madras High Court. 

In 2011, she also represented India at the Homeless World Cup, an event that envisions to end homelessness through the sport of association football, in Paris.

Shaktheeshwari’s life today is a far cry from her childhood years when she struggled to continue school after her sisters dropped out and worked at a fish market in the evening to contribute to her family. 

“My father decided there was no point sending my sisters to school after they failed class 10. This could have happened to me too, but for football and coach Thangaraj,” she says.

In the 1980s, Vyasarpadi lacked even basic amenities such as power and water. The neighbourhood was also associated with crime and substance abuse. Amid this chaos, coach N Thangaraj and N Umapathy created a groundswell of education powered by sports within a community of Dalit children who were growing up battling oppression at every step.

“People from here have been playing football since the time of the British,” says Thangaraj. “Our men joined them when they needed more teammates for a game, and eventually, it became a part of our identity and our lives.”

The duo registered Slum Children Sports Talent Education Development Society as an NGO in the year 2000 and started training children in football, paying special attention to girls. They also opened up a tuition centre, where coaches and officers from Bharat Scouts and Guides volunteered as teachers. 

The impact

Since she acquired her licence from the All India Football Federation in 2015, Shaktheeshwari too has dedicated her life to train boys under 12 and girls under 18, while also turning a confidante to the issues that pervade their homes and lives—familial discord, domestic violence, alcoholism, abuse, and oppression at school.

Today, one of Shaktheeshwari’s students, 17-year-old Ilavarasi Irudhayaraj, says she has been going to school with a renewed sense of purpose ever since she started training a year-and-a-half ago. 

“I couldn’t follow what was being taught at school. Around the same time that I started playing, I also found a routine—train in the morning, go to school, come back to the tuition centre to revise what I learnt that day, and go back home by 9 pm,” she says.

“I got better at school and found a love in football. Irudhayaraj, who was raised by a single mother,  joined B.Com this year.

This kind of development is at the heart of the movement Thangaraj and Umapathy envisioned in the late 1990s. It relies on the strategy of education backed by sports. To see through this goal, they double up as coaches and mentors to the children, many of whom are raised by single parents, families with little means or are orphaned. 

For years, children of Vyasarpadi have been written off, as the neighbourhood was infamous for high dropout rates and its association with crime. 

“What people failed to notice was that the children were disadvantaged and never at fault,” says Thangaraj. “For years, the only school available to them was three to four kilometers away across an accident prone railway track. 

Parents obviously never felt safe sending their children to school. The atmosphere at home too was never conducive to their growth, as fathers turned to alcohol after long days of physical labour and the cycle of poverty continued.” 

In such a scenario, football is both a tool and an impetus for children to finish school, so that they can get through to the colleges they want on sports quota.

“Sports puts you in the eye of the storm. It makes you calm, perceptive and extremely confident. Everything the children learn on the field, they use to build their character as people,” says Shaktheeshwari.

She also stands proof to the fact that discrimination happens everywhere.

“In school, my teachers referred to me as ‘that fisher girl’, and just like that everyone knew where I came from. At football association meetings, our team has had to wait for days to have one candidate selected, when every other team (of dominant caste and class communities) would make it in a couple of hours,” she says. 

“I therefore see social change as the sole purpose of this sport. More than 90% of our children today are school goers, so I can safely say I’m on the right track.”

Fifteen year-old G Dhanushsri stopped going to school briefly when her headmaster began verbally harassing her for playing sports.

“This is common,” says Thangaraj. “We immediately got in touch with the school and worked out a way for her to train while keeping up with the curriculum, and the issue is now resolved.” 

From a time when parents were completely hostile to the idea of their daughters wearing shorts and going out to play, today, Shaktheeshwari has painstakingly blazed a trail that many young girls can follow. 

Witnessing her remarkable journey, parents too are more hopeful to the idea that sports can act as a transformative force and send their daughters to train. 

“I want to become the best defence player in my team,” says Dhanushsri. “My mum wants it too.”