The two Ds synonymous with Surat — dhandho (business) and diamond — never interested Bansari Solanki. Growing up, she wanted to be an engineer like her father. “Aeronautics,” she smiles.
Sport — hockey, specifically — was not even an afterthought. Until, after a few twists of fate, she was spotted and mentored by the legendary India forward Dhanraj Pillay, then nurtured by Olympian Romeo James to become one of India’s finest goalkeepers currently. A decade after her seemingly improbable journey began, Solanki has put Gujarat, a state with little-to-no tradition in the sport, on the world hockey map.
According to hockey historian K Arumugam, the 24-year-old, who is part of the India team for next month’s Asia Cup in Hangzhou, China, is the first woman from the western state to represent the country. She is also the first from Gujarat — male or female — to play for India after Vadodara-born Gobind Savant, who played as a left-half in the silver medal-winning team at the 1960 Olympics in Rome.
Vadodara has been central to Solanki’s rise as well.
She started playing “for fun” after a teacher introduced the sport at her school. That fun turned into sort of an obsession as Solanki watched the Hockey India League (HIL) matches on television. By the time she entered her teens, she was completely smitten, and when she heard about the academy Pillay had started in Vadodara, she packed her bags and moved to the city two hours north of Surat.
“In Gujarat, there was no hockey at all,” Solanki tells The Indian Express. “I started playing just for fun at my school. Then, Dhanraj Pillay Sir came to Gujarat and he provided me with the platform.”
Solanki accidentally became a goalkeeper. Playing for her school team, she started as a defender. However, for one of the matches, the team was without a goalkeeper. “I was a little tall and fat, so the coach told me, ‘you become our goalkeeper’,” Solanki laughs.
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Ironically, one of the world’s fiercest goal-scorers, who made a career by outwitting the goalkeepers, became her guru. Pillay remembers Solanki as “the hard-working girl who asked the most number of questions”.
The Sports Authority of Gujarat had appointed the former India captain as the executive director and chief coach of its newly-established hockey programme. “In that role, I travelled to different corners of Gujarat to scout players and held selection trials. That’s how I came across Bansari, who appeared at a selection trial in Vadodara,” Pillay says.
“Her parents fully supported her, which was essential because Gujarat had no hockey history. She was hardworking, which is always a coach’s delight. And she was curious, always asking the right questions. We had 35 girls and 35 boys, and Bansari emerged as one of the finest players in that group,” he says. One time, Pillay recalls, his protege penned an “emotional tribute” for him.
Solanki remembers her early years training under Pillay fondly. “He was my biggest inspiration, having come from a humble background to reach great heights. With him around, I had a lot of hope that if such a legend is my coach, maybe I can achieve something too,” she says.
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Solanki became a key player in Pillay’s academy team that travelled across Gujarat for competitions. Romeo James, the Olympian who was the coach of the National Hockey Academy in New Delhi, noticed her performances and picked her in 2017.
In the first few months of living in Delhi, Solanki had frequent bouts of homesickness. “Vadodara was just a couple of hours away from Surat. But Delhi is very far… and culturally very different since most of the players were from the Northern states,” she says. “But at the end of the day, we were all 16-17 years old with a common interest: hockey.”
Soon, she was immersed in the new routine. James has coached generations of goalkeepers — from A B Subbaiah and Ashish Ballal in the 1990s to Devesh Chauhan and Adrian D’Souza in the noughties and modern-day great P R Sreejesh recently. He polished her basics — kicking, stepping, side-ways shuffle — and exposed her to modern goalkeeping techniques. Studious since childhood, Solanki would note down every tiny detail after each session in a diary.
It was the practice matches with boys, however, that really upped her level, according to James. “Boys are hard-hitters, sharp-hitters… that’s how she became very strong. We used to have six-a-side games, mixed teams with three boys and three girls on each side. Those games used to be hard and we followed it up with a penalty shootout with boys,” James says.
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The Covid-19 pandemic wiped out the chance to play for India’s junior team for a generation of players, as the tournaments got postponed and the players then fell out of the age brackets. Solanki was one of them, and she calls that phase the most challenging.
“I constantly thought about whether I’ll ever be able to make it to the senior team because the usual progression is that you first play for the junior team and then progress to the senior level,” she says.
In late 2021, however, she once again impressed the national team management when — while playing in a practice match against the India team ahead of the Junior World Cup — she came up with a series of eye-catching performances.
It earned her a call-up to the national camp, and she has been a constant feature in the core group in recent years. India’s women’s team, which hopes to secure a World Cup berth by winning the Asia Cup, is in a state of transition, including in the goalkeeping department, with Savita Punia in the twilight of her career.
An injury to Punia — “she was my inspiration when I joined the core group,” Solanki says — paved the way for Solanki to get into the Asia Cup-bound team.
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But Solanki is cautious not to get ahead of herself. “I am happy and nervous, in a positive way,” she says. “But this is just the beginning, it’s not my final destination.”
