As a new immigrant community, most of us were just settling in and did not have the time or the resources to send our kids to professional sports training, which was very expensive. So I wanted to create a very affordable but professional sports training program for our next generation. 

In the spring of 2016, the idea finally materialized. I started a sports training program for kids aged 9 to 12. Volleyball and Badminton were very close to my heart, and the training program was built around creating a very competitive volleyball team and developing very high-level badminton players. It was supposed to be a 6-year project, so I named it Dream Team 2022. We operated under the Niagara Spartans Sports Club registration. 

I shared the idea with some of my close friends and started the club with full support from them, utilizing the Hamilton Wentworth Catholic District School Board gyms. We were able to secure Monday evenings and Friday evenings for volleyball and badminton coaching. John Michael agreed to be the manager, and Girish Pillai came on board to help with the coaching and physical training. Our first batch consisted of 20 kids.

 By the fourth year, our hard work started showing signs of success. 18 of our 20 kids made it to their respective school volleyball teams, and by the 5th year, we had 4 school team captains from our club. It was probably the first time in the history of Hamilton that so many Malayalee kids secured a spot in their school volleyball teams. We organized our first Dream Team Volleyball Tournament in 2022, and our kids, barely 17 or 18 years old, secured a semi-final finish against very well experienced adult volleyball players across Ontario. Since then, we have had a podium finish in almost all the tournaments we participated in.

 Across our badminton players, our kids won the HWCDSB boys singles championships and girls singles championships 3 years in a row, and many others secured podium finishes. Overall, our sincere efforts gave us amazing results, and all our kids got into prestigious Universities and are pursuing very competitive undergraduate degrees currently, bringing our motto – Excellence in Life Through Sports, to an absolute reality.

 In 2022, based on requests from the community and taking confidence from the great success of our program, we decided to continue the project. D.T. Sports Club was officially registered as a not-for-profit corporation. Leah started taking a much prominent role, and we hired coaches from our 2016 batch to run the daily activities of the club. I am so proud of what we, the coaches, were able to achieve together with the parents of our first batch, and very happy to see this continue. Hamilton surely has a very bright future in sports.