The Better India · 11 hours ago

Coach’s Love for Basketball Keeps 3000 ‘At-Risk’ Kids on Path to Winning

What began with four children, two bamboo poles, and a makeshift hoop in a dirt clearing has grown into something that resists easy categorization - part sports program, part school, part shelter from the edges of a harder life. Pradyot Voleti, a basketball coach in Noida, India, has worked with over 3,000 children from low-income families across eight villages, building courts, funding shoes, and insisting that time on the court must be earned through computer class. "These children come from homes where they witness alcoholism, and domestic violence and receive inadequate nutrition," he says, "but they still come to the court, play hard, bring results and offer no excuses." In that refusal to make excuses, Pradyot finds his reason to keep going - and in him, children like Dinesh and Sachin found not just a coach, but a doorway into a different idea of what their lives could hold.