Playing and Training Outside Your Home State: The Language Nobody Warns You About

Indumathi Kathiresan was called to a national football trial with 50 girls. “I was the only one from Tamil Nadu. No other girl spoke Tamil, and I could not speak either Hindi or English, so I could not really communicate with anyone,” she told PTI, as carried by The Bridge.

It lasted more than a month. She cried on the phone to her mother, who told her to come home. She stayed, smiled, nodded and kept going. She went on to play in India’s midfield.

Families plan the fees, the kit and the school transfer before a child leaves the state. The language of the place is rarely on the list.

It happens to the best of them

PR Sreejesh grew up in Ernakulam. When he first reached the Indian hockey camp he did not know Hindi. “My situation was like a dog lost at a temple ground,” he told ESPN in 2022. “I didn’t know the language, I had no friends, was not getting food to my taste. All the coaches were speaking in Hindi.”

What saved him, he said, was his position. A goalkeeper works largely alone, so he did not have to build an understanding with anyone else. “Otherwise, I’d have long ago packed my bags and gone home.”

That last line is the one a parent should read twice. In a team sport, an outfield player from another state does not get that shelter.

What language a camp actually runs in

There is no published list. No federation or academy website we have read states the language its coaching is delivered in. What exists is what players have said.

ESPN described Hindi as the Indian hockey team’s most widely spoken language. When Harendra Singh became the men’s coach in 2018, Sardar Singh told PTI, as carried by MyKhel: “One big positive (after his arrival) is that we all communicate in Hindi now.”

So the working assumption for a national camp in a team sport is Hindi, with English when the coach is a foreigner. A state academy usually runs in the language of its state. Treat both as assumptions and ask before the child joins.

Where it costs the most

In the short break. Sardar Singh again: “With foreigners, even if you miss a single point during those two-minute breaks it can create confusion in the minds of the players.” A coach has two minutes between quarters. Nobody translates.

In the room, the mess and the evening. Indumathi and Sreejesh both describe the same thing, and neither is describing the training ground. It is having nobody to talk to. Hostel life away from family is hard enough in a language the child knows.

In being read wrongly. ESPN’s 2016 profile records that Sreejesh was often bullied at the junior camp for his little Hindi or English. A quiet child in a new group gets taken for a sulking one. Building trust with strangers on a new team depends on being able to say something to them.

A tournament week needs much less

A week in another state for a tournament is a different problem. Nobody learns a language for it, and nobody needs to.

What a travelling player needs is small: numbers, directions, food words, “where is”, “how much”, “I don’t understand, please say it slowly” and the name of the venue written in the local script on paper. A state-level player goes back to the same few states year after year, so the stock builds up.

Franchise leagues show how this goes. Ram Mehar Singh, then coaching Patna in the Pro Kabaddi League, said Iranian players had slowly picked up Hindi, and that the problem belongs mostly to a player’s first season. After a couple of seasons it stops being a big one.

How players actually learned

Not from a book, in the accounts above.

Harendra Singh, Sreejesh’s junior coach, moved his room-mate from a player from the south to one from the north, on purpose. Indumathi’s coaches told her plainly that football needs talking and that she had to learn. “So I started to learn, and now I can manage.”

The lesson for a family is about timing. Both of them learned after arriving, in the hardest weeks. A child who knows a few hundred words before leaving home skips the worst month. Bhashayan, a sister project of ours for learning Indian languages, is built for that head start.

The same skill pays later

Three kinds of work lean on it directly.

Coaching outside your state or country. Indian kabaddi coaches have worked in Korea, Japan and Iran. An Indian coach, Shailaja Jain, took Iran’s women to the 2018 Asian Games gold, beating India 27-24 in the final. She said communication was not easy, so she learnt Persian, PTI reported. Coaching after your playing career covers how domestic players get into that work.

Regional-language commentary. Former India opener Abhinav Mukund moved into Tamil commentary for the 2018 IPL. “Our basic duty is to present it with simple words in Tamil,” he told DT Next. Our article on commentary and media work is honest about how narrow that door is.

A sports quota job away from home. Railways, the armed forces and public sector employers recruit across the country. Before applying, check where the vacancy is and what language the workplace runs in. The Railway sports quota guide explains the route.

This is a narrower claim than “languages are good for your career”. It is that these particular jobs go to the person who can talk to the players, the viewers or the office.