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Category : Podcast
“Sport is just one of the many things that we offer what we really offer is this amazing Sisterhood”
Hi I'm Brian Fetzer I am here on the first-ever Sisters in Sweat podcast! You're in for a treat! What we're gonna do is give you a little bit of background and give you a little insight on this movement that is coming across India and I can tell you right now it's gonna be sweeping across the world real soon.
First off, the founders, the women behind Sisters in Sweat, I want you to take a few seconds and just tell everybody who you are and we'll get into the nuts and bolts of Sisters in Sweat afterward but they want to know who you are like who started this whole thing.
“My name is Shweta Subbiah from Bangalore India. I grew up playing a lot of hockey in school and I've always been passionate about sport. Lost my way and moved away from sport like every good Indian childhood, through university, and college, where academics sort of took precedence and finally found my way back into sport when I decided to become a fitness instructor after university and college. And surviving two years of a corporate job and had the Good Fortune to meet my co-founder here Tanvi Hans, who will introduce herself in a minute, but together we co-founded Sisters in Sweat, which we'll talk about a little bit more.”
“I'm the other co-founder Tanvi Hans, I'm actually from Delhi and I'm a footballer and my football journey actually started in Delhi when I was about eight-nine years old. I started playing with the boys and to be very honest, even today I prefer to play with the boys. It's been about 20 plus years that I've been playing the sport and have played at various levels in India. I also had the good fortune of playing in England for a couple of big clubs, in London, and the hope was that you know with the exposure that I had in England, you know with the football I wanted to bring back, any kind of education and growth that I had as a footballer and make a difference here in India. Little did I know that when I came back in 2016, I would bump into my very close friend Swetha here and then one day we just get this lovely opportunity to start a movement together, which we're very proud of.
What is the whole concept of Sisters in Sweat?
“Well, to be very honest, the concept has evolved over time. When we first started Sisters in Sweat, we did it just as a one-off fun thing that we could do with our friends which is really to catch up and play sport. Tanvi and I have always felt like growing up, we were the girls who wanted to play whereas all the other girls didn't want to play, so we assumed that was the way things were you know, we were the anomalies. And when we did decide to do that first session of Sisters in Sweat, it wasn't an organised thing with a plan in mind.
We just said, ‘let's catch up with a bunch of girls who are interested in playing sport’ and Tanvi obviously being the professional footballer was able to teach some of our friends some basic technical aspects of football and me having the fitness instructor background, I planned the warm-up and cool down so that's kind of how things got started with just this one session that we thought we'd do with our friends on a weekend and what ended up happening then, is that the girls that came in are friends, ready to play that one Sunday football session with us enjoyed themselves so much, and had such a great time that they asked us to do it every weekend. So that's kind of how it started and it then evolved into something much bigger than we could have ever imagined, because I think we started seeing that we are actually not the anomaly, it was just girls that we were privileged enough really to follow through with our passion.”
“And whereas the girls that were joining us did not have either the opportunity or sort of got sidetracked with other responsibilities in their lives and were only too happy to get back into sport. We’d get questions like, ‘who is this open to?’ ‘hey I want to be involved, is there an age range? Is there a fitness level?’ We're proud of the fact that we're very inclusive, we have members as young as 12-13 years old who've come for our sessions and it's gone up all the way to some grandmothers as well who are 55-56 years old. And you know, the fitness level is something we keep in mind because, the idea of what we want to do is to reduce the barriers to entry for women in sport at any level, you could be someone who's never kicked a football before but we design a session exactly for you so you have fun. You then walk away maybe feeling a little bit fitter, like you can get better at the sport, making friends in the process and then we have gradually got women who come regularly, who see themselves getting better and then we started to cater to women at an intermediate level as well, as more and more women get into sport.
We'll be catering to women at different levels and the different skill sets too in the future but right now it's just that we want to give that access to women to play sport at a recreational level and maybe even meet their fitness and personal goals in the process.
Any woman who has the desire to play sport, our goal is to provide them the opportunity to do so, the intention of Sisters in Sweat is also to cater to every type of woman. So not every woman is looking to play sport, some of them, just want to make friends in a new city, so we do offer a lot of non-sport based activities and events such as karaoke nights, pizza making evening, and we've also done a couple of off-site trips, you know a hike for example, that involves physical activity but I think the whole idea behind Sisters in Sweat of course is to make sport accessible recreationally to women across the country but also to create a Sisterhood.
Because we know how strong that can be in every asset of your life if you have a strong group of women backing you, that makes people feel very empowered, gives people a feeling of belonging. It just gives you more confidence in your choices, going forward and I think without intentionally ever meaning to start any of this to achieve those ends, Sisters in Sweat has over and over again proved to us that sport is just one of the many things that we offer, but what we really offer is this amazing Sisterhood that sort of has your back through various stages of life, in various challenges, through the good and the bad, you have this huge ever-growing family of female energy across the country and hopefully across the world someday.
Where can they do this, I mean and I know you are in Bangalore. Like is, there other parts of India or is that you know future expansion what what is where where can they participate?
Right now we're physically present in Bangalore and Mumbai, we started in Bangalore, where both Tanvi and I are based but we've also launched sessions in Mumbai. We launched that in May of last year, the plan and the dream obviously is to be present pan-india and the big dream of course is to be global.
We really want this podcast to be an opportunity for women to sort of learn of the different journeys that women in sport in business have taken to be sort of successful, get to know them a little bit more personally, I think what we have really or at least I can speak for Tanvi and me here what we lacked when we were sort of setting off on our professional paths at least was mentorship, right, we didn't have those women to look up to and say, ‘Hey I want to be like her or that's a path I would like to follow.’ We're hoping with the range of women that we get to interview and the privilege to interview and talk to, that the people listening in will have something to take away from that to fuel their own journey to get more confidence get more answers and just someone to look up to and help them through their journey, because that's something we felt that we definitely missed out on to a large extent and it would be great for us to fill that gap as well while we're doing everything else that we're doing.
Well that sounds amazing, I am excited, I'm very fortunate to be part of this first one and so excited to see the journey going forward! Thank you both for your time and telling everybody what's in store for Sisters in Sweat on the podcast. Amazing! Stay tuned, there's going to be more, there's going to be more to come.
Absolutely thanks Brian. Have a great one bye bye!
