Errol D’Cruz

Call it solving simultaneous equations if you like. Kiran Kaur Gill, a mathematics schoolteacher, has struck a fine chord with her pupils in combining lessons in the classroom and wielding the stick on the hockey pitch.

At Holyhead school in Birmingham, Kiran has shown how the two pursuits could be combined to great effect, especially when it comes to boosting confidence and academic prowess as well as breaking barriers across ethnicity, race, economic divide and even gender.

Kiran Kaur Gill

“I always tell my students to do a sport,” says the 29-year-old of Indian origin whose grandparents left Jalandhar, Punjab, to emigrate to Britain in the 1950s. “Take a break from sitting in front of the computer, move into open space and take in a lot of oxygen,” Kiran expresses her credo.

And what better way than playing hockey, she advises her students as she celebrates a passion for the sport that she took to relatively late in life and after she was loathe to have anything to do with it.

“My father (Sukhdev) did his best to get me to play his favourite sport hockey but I wasn’t quite prepared to get up early, brave the cold and head to a pitch as one the very few girls playing the game at Barford Tigers, the club he was associated with when I was growing up. My older sister (Charan), however, took to the game and played with the boys. Unfortunately a ruling prohibiting girls to play in boys’ teams came in and it sidelined her for a while till the club were able to field a girls team.”

So what made Kiran eventually fall under the spell of the ball- and-stick game?

Kiran Kaur playing at her club Barford Tigers’ turf

“Well, after graduating, I returned to Birmingham and didn’t find the friends I grew up with as they had all gone their separate ways. Hoping to build a social circle, I accompanied my sister to her hockey games – a move that drew much cheer from my father and mother (Amarjeet). That’s when I got hooked on the game and I discovered how it invokes team spirit, determination, pushing yourself to achieve and a lot more. There was no looking back after that…”

Inspired by her new-found passion, Kiran wanted to share the manifold benefits with her beloved students at school as she organizes training sessions for her students with her club Barford Tigers.

“Many of the girls in my school are of South Asian origin and are shy, worried about not being good enough and thereby lack energy and self-belief. In time, things began to change. There was a spirit of bonding that cut across the divides of society. There was also the breaking down of barriers between the genders and the boys and girls began to mix as hockey took over,” Kiran says.

The gains went beyond the skills and strategy on the hockey pitch, reveals Kiran.

“As a team, they played to their strengths even while ensuring the weaker players are well and truly part of the team.”

Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic put a stop to the team’s activity, much to the disappointment of the students who were so keen to play and were getting on very well with each other, Kiran reveals.

Kiran’s hunch that playing a sport, hockey in this case, would work wonders with studies appears to be well founded.

“A boy falling behind in his math grades was not allowed to join his classmates on the hockey pitch until he improved. He longed to play so he upped his grades and picked up the stick again. I find the students a lot more focussed now,” Kiran says.

Around 15 students play hockey at Holyhead and are in the 11-15 age group. Football, thanks to local professional football club Aston Villa, gets due share of attention while basketball and Physical Education are also sporting pursuits at the school.

Kiran has soaked up the concepts of hockey. At Barford Tigers, she plays as a central defender and adjusts her role to match situations and the team’s needs.

And she’s really made up for her late start after taking to the sport following graduation in Business Administration. For a project to secure her Post Graduate Certificate of Education for teaching qualification, Kiran researched and delivered her findings on hockey’s biggest controversy – Ashok Kumar’s match-winning goal in the 1975 Kuala Lumpur World Cup final against Pakistan which India won for their only title so far. “I used various tools including computer technology to ascertain whether or not it was a goal (the subject of much debate for decades),” she reveals.

And the verdict?

“It was a goal!,” she says calmly. “Kiran’s findings will undoubtedly find favour with millions of fans old enough to remember the incident that drew protests from Pakistani players who surrounded Malaysian umpire G. Vijayanathan to no avail.

She also has been able to decipher the game and the surfeit of technology that goes along with it. When asked why the laptops with coaches in the dugout whereas football coaches only rely on their eyes and lungs to direct affairs in the heat of battle, Kiran doesn’t need to deliberate for an answer.

Hockey and education go hand in hand in distant Delhi

“It’s the speed of the game calling for professional work and tools to suggest what positions players need to assume to get the ball. The angles need to be worked out to get us where we’re all interested in – the goal. We use math but it’s also a lot about physics…”

There we go. Kiran’s aptitude for the sciences and hockey are evident and the confluence of the two provides lessons in humanities as we have seen.

For the students of Holyhead it’s a God-sent especially as she gazes into the future and says: “I want hockey to give students the ability to find new hobbies and life skills and also to deal with losing and competition with confidence and a sense of self-belief.”

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www.stick2hockey.com is India’s oldest hockey website. Launched in 1999, the website, edited and owned by hockey historian and author K. ARUMUGAM, has covered all major tournaments and events with precision. www.stick2hockey.com is the first site in the hockey world to bring viewers live text commentary and duly entered the prestigious Limca Book of Records. If vintage stories are what you are looking for, this site is the right one for you. You will also find pictures, some of them among the rarest, images of precious newspaper clippings, match reports, news breaks, interviews, features, statistics and history on a site respected by one and all in the hockey world.