SportsMeet-Bangalore, August Edition a success

The third edition of SportsMeet - Bangalore was the most engaging and attended edition so far. The SportsMeet August event of How to kick-start your sports venture attracted a number of entrepreneurs, management students and sports enthusiasts.

Vishal Gupta used his venture Sports365 as a model to give the audience an insight about How to kick start your sports venture. With a vision of building and fostering the spirit of sports and fitness activities in the country, Sports365 aims in making sports viable and sustainable for the masses. As an e-commerce venture for sports equipments, consumables and infrastructure, Vishal Gupta started Sports365 along with Tennis maestro Mahesh Bhupathi as Director and Chandra Sekhar Reddy. However, with time they also went also started offline marketing. One of their specialties includes 'consultative selling' where the products are provided to the consumer after a discussion on their requirements. Sports365 is aiming high with a long term goal of providing a support system for young and unknown talents and roping in some popular sporting figures in the company.

Earlier, the event kickstarted with TENVIC representative Shruti Venkat. TENVIC, co-founded in 2011 by legendary cricketer Anil Kumble, strategist and entrepreneur Dinesh Kumble, and international Table-tennis player Vasanth Bharadwaj, with a vision to develop a sporting ecosystem and culture in India, whereby every Indian is involved in sports.

They have initiated work at multiple levels
- Grassroot: reaching out and training young talents in schools
- Lessons from Sports: using the knowledge gained from sportsmen to train people of other professions
- Sports branding: finding new avenues to reach customers and brand sportsmen and Sports retail

At the moment they have focused on Cricket, Table-tennis, Chess and Badminton. At grassroot level, they have been able to start programs in various schools, mainly in Southern India and the National Capital Region. The programs contents are created by reputed players for each disciplines and kids who have shown promise are given opportunities of intensive training with their coaches to take their talent to the next level.

They have also used the experience of sportsmen in areas like 'pressure handling' and conducted training programs for people of different professions. TENVIC harbors in-house coaches, mentors and psychologists for their programs.

The talks moved into the highly interesting and much lesser known area of Barefoot running. Sharath Raju spoke about his venture HighLine, which specializes not only in providing footwear for barefoot running but also training sessions.

Sharath explained, briefly, about the biology and mechanics involved in jogging and running and how the traditional shoes are inadequate to cater a healthy and injury free way of doing so. They also maintain Vivobarefoot training clinic, which trains the consumers on the correct and injury free ways of barefoot running.

This presentation along with Vishal Gupta's talk also showed how online marketing has really grown successfully in India.

The talks ended with a presentation on Sportz Divas, an initiative by Anuradha. Sportz Divas aims to promote the achievements of Women athletes in India. Anuradha herself is a national-level gymnast and the only Indian woman to have participated in the Fitness Championships in Las Vegas. Also, she has a sports management degree from Switzerland. And apart from that, interestingly, she is a dentist!

Anuradha made a point about how most sportswomen in India come from a rural and poor background, thus unable to promote themselves. Many women athletes, despite winning medals in national and international competitions are struggling economically. Sportz Divas reaches out such women athletes and tries to formulate ways to promote them and discover their brand value.

The event ended with the networking session, where the participants discussed different matters and collaborations with the speakers over coffee and snacks. Interestingly, some of the participants were from outside of Bangalore. Overall the event was a success and organizers are happy that SportsMeet is catching up fast with more and more people showing interest.