Joshi, who is the co-founder and Director at Sportz Village Xp, was conferred with the prestigious Public Relations Council of India’s ‘Entrepreneur of The Year’ award for Sportz Village Xp’s phenomenal contribution towards grassroots sports development in India. Sportz Village Xp facilitated playing opportunities for over four million Indians in 2017, including young kids, youth, adults, and corporate executives. This year, the team won three Awards at WOW Asia including a Gold for RF. NBA Jr. program.

SportsCafe : How did the idea of Mumbai Games originate in the first place and can you please take us through the process of getting this dream to reality?

Today, our team brims in happiness seeing a player as young as 4 yrs coming all prepped for his game while one sweating it out at 71. In the first season, 10,896 Mumbaikars joined our mission, and the ongoing Season 2 is edging closer to double numbers. And now we are so proud that Mumbai Games is a part of Fit India Movement.

SC : Organising a tournament like Mumbai Games must be a logistical challenge. Was it?

We also invested in technology to tackle complex processes at the core - like online registrations, automatic draws & scheduling of matches, timely communication with participants etc, making Mumbai Games thoroughly paperless games. Our relationships with MOA (Maharashtra Olympic Association)  and various sports associations also helps in streamlining on-ground processes. All in all, our whole team at Sportz Village Xp is obsessed with sports and great participant experience - so it becomes easy. 

SC :You have got some great sports personalities as GC members for Mumbai Games? How much impact the likes of Gopichand, Anjali Bhagwat and Viren Rasquina bring to the table?

SC : Coming to your personal achievements Mr Joshi, how did you envision Sportz Village Xp and the success that it has generated ever since its inception?

Joshi : Sportz Village Xp was founded with the mission to make 100 million Indian kids play. Hence all our activations, ideas and services spin around the vision that people should come out and engage in sports, irrespective of age, gender, or skill level  – and simply make it a part of the lifestyle and be the primary source of inspiration for the newest generation. We have reached out to millions through our IPs like Mumbai Games, grassroots initiatives at school level and sports programs with brands like Hero, Reliance Foundation, Adidas, Nike, Milo, Bisleri, Perfetti, Boost, Asics, Bridgestone, Coca-Cola, Tata Tea, Mattel, BBC, Star Sports etc. It has been great and there’s a lot to do yet. 

Joshi : We, as a company, have always believed in acting pre-emptively and hence immediately loved the Tata Tea campaign idea. We adapted the core idea to an on-ground activation for Tata Tea and ran a 4-state self-defence training programme ‘Suraksha’ that reached out to over 1 lakh girls from 340 schools. The program was not just symbolic but an intensive one with 6 hours of training under 200 martial arts instructors. 

Prior to this, we had accomplished a rare record feat of training close to 6 lakhs school girls in Gujarat and Rajasthan under the programmes ‘Padkaar’ & ‘Saksham’ with respective State Governments. Certainly, more corporate houses and Governments should take up such steps. I and the whole team are always sleeved up to bring about initiatives and programs that make grass-root changes, making up a better society time-over-time.

Joshi : At Sportz Village, we strongly believe in “mass participation” as a critical pillar in the making of a sporting nation. The idea or reason behind our mission of making 100 million play sports is that only when the bottom of the pyramid is strong, we will have the future top pyramid swell. We see validation of our philosophy when both sporting and non-sporting giants invest at the grass-root level to imbibe the sports culture further. Over the last few years, we are proud and happy to have provided opportunities to play to more than 3 million Indians.