Hard beginnings
Listening to Prasad speak about his struggle to institutionalise the game in Bihar and his relentless battle to rope in sponsors to sustain a team of tribal girls is heartening. In this season where first the dubious deeds of a hockey official got exposed by a television sting and later the long reign of his boss came to an ignominious end; Prasad, along with a few other good men, provide the silver lining in the dark clouds looming over the sport.
Prasad goes back to the early days of his journey and the trip to Delhi when he was bothered by Bihar going unrepresented in the national side. “For starters, we thought of locating someone with a blazer at the hockey stadium and ask about the missing Bihar girls,” he says. Their efforts paid dividends and somebody guided them to Kartar Singh, the then secretary of the Indian Women’s Hockey Federation. “He told me unless we have a state association, our players cannot play at the national level. He asked me to file an application for setting up one,” he recalls.
A couple of months after that, Prasad received a letter asking him to send four best players for a month-long assessment camp to Delhi. That put Prasad in a fix. “I had seen girls playing in schools but didn’t know how to zero in on the best four,” he says. With a help of a few coaches at the Ranchi University, he sent the girls to Delhi but still the application to form an association wasn’t cleared.
Next year the demand was repeated but this time Prasad was ready. “I knew the hockey circuit by now and that meant the best girls from the state — Alma Gudiya, Dayami Soy, Savitri Purti and Vishwati Purti — were sent,” he says. So impressed was the national body by the girls that one of them — Savitri — was selected to join the Indian team and very soon the state association came into existence. “My residential quarter at the HEC’s servants colony became the office of the Bihar Women’s Hockey Association,” says Prasad, now vice-president of the Jharkhand Hockey Association, also founded by him.
Later in December 1983, Prasad became aware of the harsh realities of running a hockey body as he had to send a team for the Junior Girls National Championship. “Funding the trip was a problem. But we managed to convince the state’s Sports Authority of India unit to provide financial support,” recalls Prasad.
Next year came the big moment as Bihar was to finally get a chance to play the women’s nationals.

... contd.