Friday , April 26 2024

STAIRS School Football League footballers selected for Gujarat youth team!

The Gujarat State Football Association (GSFA) has selected twenty-seven young and talented footballers from the STAIRS School Football League (SSFL)-Gujarat for the Gujarat youth state team, who will represent Gujarat in the forthcoming Junior National Football Championship.

Season 3 of the Uflex Stairs School Football League (SSFL) Gujarat in association with GSFA concluded with the selection of these 27 football players amid loud cheer and excitement at the Sports Authority of India Complex in Gandhinagar earlier today. Conceptualised to identify football talent at early adolescence so that India could get some of the best footballers, SSFL-Gujarat is joined by Uflex, India’s largest flexible packaging company, under its corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy.

The mega sports event Uflex SSFL-3 saw more than 30,000 school-level footballers from Delhi and Gujarat participating in the tournament. The Championship witnessed avid participation from teams of under-14 boys, U-17 boys and girls’ teams in U-14 and U-17 categories.

C.V. Som, Principal Secretary to Government of Gujarat and MD, GSCSC Ltd., who presided over the occasion as the chief guest appreciated the joint effort by SSFL and GSFA, while wishing luck to the selected players. The closing event was followed by a prize distribution ceremony, during which trophies, medals and certificates were given to the winning team and players for showing exemplary performance. Overall, four winning teams – one each from Under-14 Girls, U-14 Boys, U-17 Girls, U-17 Boys lifted the majestic gold plated Champions Trophy while the runners-up received the Grand Silver Trophy.

Congratulating the selected players, GSFA secretary Gulab Chauhan said, “We are excited to see that in a short span SSFL in Gujarat has created enormous scouting opportunities at grassroots. Before SSFL, there has been no professionally managed platform of such a scale in the state for young footballers to showcase their talent. Thanks to the SSFL format, we have witnessed development of football in the state. it is for the first time in the history of Gujarat state football that all the semifinalists were at par on the points table and it was difficult to choose the winner.”

“Also, in this season of SSFL we witnessed exemplary performance from two districts that were not in the reckoning in the earlier seasons. The mission of SSFL is completely in sync with the objective of GSFA which is to build football culture, create multiple opportunities for footballers and introduce sustainable and scalable programmes that can position Gujarat as a sporting state,” Gulab Chauhan added.

Congratulating the players on the selection, Siddhartha Upadhyay, Founder and Secretary General, STAIRS, said, “I congratulate the players who have been selected to the Gujarat State Team and will represent the state at the national level. It is indeed a proud moment for us to see our program SSFL, having increased in scale in such a short span of time. I thank GSFA for facilitating SSFL in Gujarat and hope this will inspire a lot more young talent to come forward and be a part of this program in years to come. It is just the beginning of identifying real talent at the grassroots and giving them an opportunity to play at the national level.”

GUJARAT Juniors

Goalkeepers
Parth Katarmal (Gandhinagar), Preet Patel (Ahmedabad)

Defenders
Nitish R. Singh (Valsad), Saurabh Maheshwari (Bhavnagar), Darren Job (Ahmedabad), Pritesh Shetty (Baroda), Ishant (Baroda), Mukesh Bhill (Banaskantha)

Midfielders
Mayank Chauhan (Ahmedabad), Romil Shah (Rajkot), Shaurabh Salunke (Valsad)

Forwards
Keval Patel (Surat), Mehul Vaghela (Mehsana), Rohit Fariyal (Baroda), Rahul Parmar (Bhavnagar), Ayan Shaikh (Ahmedabad), Ashish Bisht (Gandhinagar), Sujan Thapa (Kutch), Pratik Swami (Valsad)

Stand-Bye
Avi Joshi (Rajkot, Goalkeeper), Zuber Jinwala (Baroda, Defender), Chris Dias (Ahmedabad, Defender), Ankit Thakur (Bhavnagar, Midfielder), Musa Saiyed (Banaskantha, Midfielder), Prince Singh (Bharuch, Forward), Kshitij Gohel (Bhavnagar, Forward)

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