SHARE Football Club : New Football Club from North east

A group of football loving youths from the small town of Kalimpong have set out to achieve a dream which, if fulfilled, can change the face of football in the entire Darjeeling hills. Their dream to take their club to the zenith of Indian Football, the I-League! And they are already on the job. In the forthcoming paragraphs we will find out more about this dream.

SHARE Football Club, Kalimpong was an idea or rather a dream which was born around five years back, but finally in July this year the club started taking baby steps towards its ultimate dream of playing in the I-League and within five months, the baby steps had turned into a brisk walk, with the club giving professional contracts to all its players with savings account in the bank where their salaries are deposited. Mostly the current bunch of players are students, so they are paid token amounts which they can use for their school fees and other expenditure.

SHARE, which stands for Support Himalayan Agro Rural Enterprises is a Kolkata based society and along with their core business of tourism promtion they are also involved in promoting football in the hills, which includes holding village level tournament called “SHARE CUP” to promote talented players from the remote villages. When SHARE came in touch with these group of young men who were trying to launch a football team, SHARE gave in their full support to this concept as both the groups believed in the same goal and a new entity was born – SHARE Football Club.

The team

SHARE Football Club currently has 28 players in its roll, and most of them are standard twelve pass-outs. The Treasurer of the Club, Ryan Karthak Lepcha informed “We have taken full consent of all the parents and the school to allow these boys to play football for our club, our basic aim is to help this boys become good players in future and also pursue their education, we have plans to taken in some school drop-outs who are good players and help them shape their careers” In February next year the final selection of the players will be held and after that club plans to keep just thirty players in the age group of 17 to 21 years. The Club has appointed Chintamani Rai, an FA licensed coach who is without any shadow of doubt the best youth level coach of this region. Another coach, Kabi Sarkar who is from Kolkata, is yet to join the team.

Share has already started churning out good players “Cho Tshering Lepcha was selected to play for Bhawanipur FC in the Kolkata league but he could not play first team football regularly there and now he is playing for Rainbow FC and we are sure he’ll will get back his lost form and do well as he is just 23 years of age”, Ryan Karthak said. Other two boys are also in the eyes of bigger clubs from Kolkata.

Getting sponsorship is a big hurdle in this part of the world but SHARE FC has found innovate methods. They put up stalls during events or concerts and sell variety of items to the customers and the earning from these goes to the club’s fund. The members also donate from their savings to keep the club’s day to day affair moving. At the same time they are aware that if they want to sustain themselves in Indian Football they have to find a proper sponsor so the management is already in talks with a few companies.

SHARE FC’s future plan is to open up branches all across the Darjeeling hills. One has already come up at a place called Gorubathan and that team is also doing well. Another unique point SHARE FC is they want to treat other clubs in this region not as their rivals rather they want to take them into confidence and work along with them to promote football in the hills.

Dreams take time to come true and the SHARE FC management knows that. To sum it all up, Ryan Karthak said “ We are committed to this cause and we won’t back down now no matter what.” Well the hills folks as you see they talk less and do more. And they have proved it so far.