Originally published by Sramana Mitra on LinkedIn: India's Non-Cricket Sports TV Inspires A New Generation Of Athletes

In this series, Sramana Mitra shares chapters from her book Vision India 2020, that outlines 45 interesting ideas for start-up companies with the potential to become billion-dollar enterprises. These articles are written as business fiction, as if we’re in 2020, reflecting back on building these businesses over the previous decade. We hope to spark ideas for building successful start-ups of your own.

In the twenty-first century, India was embracing consumerism at a frantic pace. To continue at this pace, these consumer brands desperately needed to reach more remote consumers, with whom it was harder to achieve deep brand engagement than with urban consumers.

Cricket was one of the primary unifying factors for the country. At the same time, I found it frustrating that when there were sports on the tube, 95% of the time it was cricket. However, on the streets and in the fields, young people kicked soccer balls, arched basketballs towards the rim, and sent badminton corks flying as well. There was a clear a gap between what was on TV and the diverse array the youth were playing. NCTV is a media company we built around the core concept of non-cricket television, funded by ESPN.

As in prior years, India put up a pathetic show in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Athletes were sent to compete in archery, badminton, boxing, hockey, judo, rowing, sailing, shooting, swimming, table tennis, tennis, track and field, and men’s freestyle wrestling. In soccer, basketball, and the bulk of other Olympic sports, India failed to qualify. For all of these entrants, India won a total of three medals, a gold in men’s 10- meter air rifle shooting and a bronze each in men’s middleweight boxing and 66- kilogram men’s freestyle wrestling. In contrast, China won 100 medals, and the United States 110.

Having studied how Jagmohan Dalmiya transformed Indian cricket from a negative- five-lakhs-a-year sport to a mega-money spinner, I was curious about how to build the same following for other sports, evolving them into similarly big-money media events. Our analysis was that an exclusive non-cricket television channel, coupled with a systematic effort in coaching, training, and audience-building, would be an apt first step.

We targeted 10 disciplines: aquatics, athletics, badminton, boxing, gymnastics, hockey, table tennis, tennis, shooting, and wrestling. Each discipline had 50 training academies spread deep into small towns in hopes of accessing the untapped talent of India. This decentralization gave us the opportunity to engage audiences in less accessible parts of the country, including those who could not attend major sporting events at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata or the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai. So instead of building audiences by pure televised inclusion, we built viewers by making them participants, players, addicts.

Each academy was a residential training and competition venue, complete with modern amenities for our 100 athletes in training. A world-class foreign coach, aided by 10 Indian coaches, spearheaded each program. Kids, ages 10 and up, were culled from each academy’s surrounding region.

To build our television audience, we looked to the reality TV phenomenon that was, in 2009, sweeping the world. Reality television saw an explosion in the early 2000s. Survivor, American Idol, and Dancing With the Stars were all top-rated series on American television. In sports, reality programs typically created a sporting competition among athletes attempting to establish themselves in that sport. The Club, in 2002, was one of the first shows to fuse sports with reality TV, with the audience helping to select which players played each week by voting for their favorites. The Big Break was a popular golf reality show. The Contender was a boxing show in which, sadly, a contestant committed suicide after being eliminated.

In our version, every academy offered a built-in cast of 100 or more characters, their families, personal stories, failures, and triumphs. Think, in its earliest form, of the award- winning documentary Hoop Dreams, and then fast-forward to ABC’s hit, Dancing With the Stars. Our framework of 500 small-town academies crossing 10 disciplines became a major phenomenon in each region’s entertainment calendar – ripe with local teams to cheer on, local heroes to worship, local stars to build, and local gossip to pass from ear to ear.

The shows were rolled out in 2010 on a region-by-region basis, in local languages, and 20 academies bloomed across eastern and western India in just one discipline: tennis. At bus stands, in schools, and on rickshaws, suddenly kids with tennis rackets became a common sighting.

Signs of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Disney, and Airtel were hoisted onto the academy rooftops, presiding over neighborhoods as proud sponsors of local centers. The centers themselves stood as modern stately buildings, often situated amidst fields of maize or rice paddies. In amenities, they were state of the art, fitted with myriad forms of equipment for stretching, toning, and aerobics, alongside ball-machines, racket-stringing facilities, and video analysis rooms.

Each academy sponsor contributed Rs. 1 crore ($200,000) for a branded center for three years, and Rs. 50 lakhs ($100,000) a year in ongoing sponsorship. These were branded as Coca-Cola Tennis Academies, Airtel Tennis Academies, and so on. Annual sponsorship included extensive physical branding on location, as well as on the athletes’ outfits. Television advertising rights were sold separately.

Our rollout ramped quickly after the first 20 academies. By 2012, we had 50 tennis centers, and 20 centers each for badminton, table tennis, and hockey. In each sport, some athletes from our academies were competing and winning at the state and national championships, which we televised for those back home to enjoy. In fact, when 14-year- old Rukmini Gupta won the table tennis women’s singles title at the Hyderabad Nationals in 2014, her entire hometown of Burhanpur in Madhya Pradesh came to the train station with marigold garlands to welcome her back.

By 2015, all 10 disciplines were up and running, and by 2018, every discipline had 50 academies. In tennis, the entire Indian Davis Cup team was made up of NCTV athletes, one of whom had advanced to the Wimbledon semifinal. Players in all 10 disciplines were sweeping state and national titles. In the 2018 Asian Games, India won 191 medals, a remarkable improvement over the 51 they earned in 2006.

Today we look toward the 2020 Olympics, to be held in New Delhi, confident that India will medal in at least five disciplines. Meanwhile, NCTV, with 25 million viewers, has become India’s most exciting, inspiring sports channel, masterminding and chronicling the story of the country’s rise as a credible sporting nation.

Photo credit: Abby Stone/Flickr.com