Not only this, the KD Singh ‘Babu’ Memorial Society which was nurtured by Sharma has been yielding fruit time and again, the latest example being two of its former trainees— Vivek Gupta and Hari Kripal representing the Junior India team which toured Australia in January this year.

Talking to Indian Express, Olympian Syed Ali who is the present technical secretary of the ‘Babu’ Society after the death of Sharma in August 2007 said, “The best way for hockey revival is building hockey nurseries across the country like ours. We impart free training to the under-14 players at the CB Gupta Khel Maidan. Each year, after being groomed by us, many of our trainees get selected in various sports hostel, sports college and Sports Authority of India (SAI) trials and from these centres they are selected for various teams. Both Vivek and Hari were trainees of the Society from a very young age. They were picked by SAI and now they got a chance to be a part of the national team. We plan to reward them on ‘Babu’ sahebs birth anniversary on Monday .”

“To mark the occasion, we will also be organising a Veterans vs SAI girls’ team match in which the former team will be represented mostly by Olympians and internationals,” Syed further disclosed.

Olympian Sujeet Kumar said that dedicated work at the grassroots level was needed to produce good players. “The biggest problem in hockey today is that the game is not commercialised so parents do not want their children to take up hockey. When the talent is not there in quantity, how can you expect good quality players being churned out from various sports centres. When we played in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, there were six players from UP in the Indian team. But now we cannot think about such a scenario because we neither have very talented players nor highly qualified coaches at various sports hostels.”