Two days after a team manager died, and in a week where around a dozen players fainted due to the heat, the organisers of the 23rd Junior National Softball Championships said they may have messed things up. ‘‘I have learnt my lessons from this tournament’’, said Umesh Sharma, secretary of the host Softball Association of Delhi (SAD), ‘‘maybe we could have done it better.’’ A series of reports in The Indian Express in the past week had highlighted how, in the middle of a heatwave, players — mainly teenage schoolchildren — had been given accommodation without beds and coolers, where the only source of drinking water was an outdoor handpump and where toilets were so dirty players bathed at the lone water tanker and used the fields as a toilet. All this time the organisers had been in a state of denial, even after the death of 50-year-old Y Subramaniam, the manager of the Tamil Nadu team, who’d been complaining of the heat. Today, it seemed they’d realised their error. ‘‘From now on, I will make sure about the climatic conditions’’, Sharma said. ‘‘In fact, I will never conduct it in the summers and also see that funds and all other essential details are sorted out before the event begins.’’ Sharma claimed, though, the association had been ‘‘unlucky’’. ‘‘The death of the official brought us unnecessary bad publicity. We haven’t got the funds from the government and the sponsors haven’t been forthcoming. We tried to give the players better facilities but maybe we could have done it better.’’ He admitted that his association had not thought through the planning. ‘‘We were getting this tournament after 18 years and we decided to hold the championship without realizing other factors. We didn’t want to lose out on this opportunity. We knew that heat would be a big factor and tried to make all the arrangements, but we probably fell short.’’ Dashratmal Mehta, secretary of the Softball Association of India, said that the dates for this tournament had been decided well in advance according to the convenience of the host association. Asked whether the dates could have been changed given that Delhi was reeling under a heatwave, he said it was impossible at the last moment. But this isn’t the end of the story. Mehta said Delhi was likely to host the Asian Youth Championships in September. ‘‘It’s a big-budget tournament and hopefully we would be able to conduct the championships better.’’ It’s a fair bet, though, that players from abroad will not be subjected to what their Indian counterparts have been dished out for this past week. THE RESULTS On the field, Kerala made it to both the boys’ and girls’ finals. The girls will meet Chandigarh, the boys Punjab. The finals are on Sunday at the Yamuna Sports Complex.
