In Bengaluru, amateur women footballers dole out lessons in life and sport

Every Thursday evening, after the grounds of the Bangalore Football Stadium are lit up, a group of women from different walks of life gathers together. They do stretches and some side shuffling. They run backwards and then laterally. All these drills are part of their warm-up routine, after which they launch into a game of football. The whole event takes about an hour and a half. Many of these women are mothers and their young children run around the group before the game starts, playing and petting the indie dogs watching patiently.

“It’s fabulous to be in the middle of the city on these grounds like this. It’s just so nice to run like a child. We cheer when someone scores. We cheer when someone runs slowly. We cheer when someone’s fast. There’s no judgement here,” says Schonali Rebello, a founding member of city-based JobsForHer, an online portal that helps women with their careers, and now also the month-old HerKey, a members-only club for women leaders (in any field).

Rebello is part of a Bengaluru-based community, which comprises women who wanted to play football though many had never played any sport before. But the community, called Sisters in Sweat, has since initiated them not just into football, but also given rise to a sorority of sorts that is continuing to grow.

“We’ve never done any marketing. The group has just grown organically,” says Swetha Subbiah, who co-founded the group with Tanvie Hans. While Subbiah is one of four Nike-certified fitness instructors in the country, Hans is a professional football player who has previously played for English clubs such as Tottenham Hotspur and Fulham. Originally from Delhi, Hans moved back to India in 2016 and to Bengaluru a year later. She is now captain of the Karnataka state women’s football team.

Ordinarily, the opening lines of someone walking into a bar would be the build-up to a joke, but in this particular case it was Subbiah introducing her long-time friend Rebello to Hans. “So, you are a footballer, right? Can you teach us how to play?” Rebello remembers asking her. Hans agreed, provided they could get a few women together. One week later they had their first class with 18 women playing football on a Saturday in September 2017. Today the group has over 300 members, who vie to get into the two weekly sessions the group holds. Thursdays is for intermediate players, Sundays for beginners. The oldest of the women who’ve been part of these games is 58; the youngest, 14. The average age of the group is 35.

Subbiah and Hans themselves first met through an ad shoot for Nike almost four years ago, the one with the catchy tune (Da Da Ding) that featured athletes and sportswomen of stature, and also had Deepika Padukone playing badminton.

The team at Sisters in Sweat is now busy prepping for the launch of its website, Sistersinsweat.in, besides figuring out how to have more sessions, meet more often, and even add more sports, such as basketball. Currently each football class is priced at Rs 500. Subbiah says the group is also likely to work with underprivileged women who can’t afford the current pay-per-class model.

“We wanted this community to be completely by women and for women because often women don’t often get as many opportunities to build a career in sports or fitness. It’s our way of supporting each other,” says Subbiah.

One example of this support manifests itself in the life of Mithila Ramani, a fresh engineering graduate from Chennai who moved to Bengaluru last September after meeting Hans. A football player herself, Ramani hopes to make a career in sports management. She doubles as a coach with Sisters in Sweat when she isn’t working as a video analyst, documenting games to study them later to improve an athlete’s performance.

Such is the influence of the community that Saachi Shetty, 19, who grew up in Dubai and returned to India last September, has put off pursuing a degree in exercise and health sciences from Australia. “I joined the group in October and have stayed on (longer than intended) to get more experience. It’s just so inspiring to see successful mothers and CEOs in their 40s and 50s playing football and staying fit,” she says. Besides helping the team organise the sessions, Shetty also handles the group’s social media.

Sisters in Sweat is all about women building each other up, echo members of the community. “However much we talk about women’s empowerment, at the end of the day it’s often another woman questioning your life choices. Being part of a healthy community like this changes you,” says Ramani.

The sport has advantages other than physical fitness alone, say the amateur players. It’s almost meditative in the sense that one has to give it complete attention. “You have to be in the moment and can’t let your thoughts wander,” says Sarah Nicole Edwards, one of the earliest people to sign up with the group. A chef and a food consultant who runs a brand called Copper + Cloves, Edwards is from London. She has always been fond of solitary fitness activities, such as running and cycling, and had never given team sports a chance before. “A friend brought me along for a match, which is pretty much how a lot of people joined the group. Turns out I really love team sports,” she says.

Back on the ground, Rebello’s six-year-old, who sometimes steps onto the ground to play, asks his mother why there aren’t any girls in the football class he attends. “He says girls play so well and that he wants girls on his team. I’m proud of him,” says Rebello. 

A lesson in parenting fits in seamlessly as the community knits itself together tight. 

Even as the women advance on the field, so do relationships.

“The women in this group support each other personally and also with each other’s businesses,” says Edwards. “This is my support system. This is my family, this is my sisterhood.”