Eight teams, 96 athletes, three days: Pulwama Kabaddi League opens at the cricket ground
The first edition of the Pulwama Kabaddi League opened on Friday at the Pulwama Cricket Stadium, with eight teams and 96 athletes from across the Kashmir Division signing up for a three-day open-category tournament that runs through Sunday. The trophy is symbolic; the bigger story is who is behind it and what they want it to become.
The league has been launched by the Jammu and Kashmir Sports Council as the first leg of a wider valley-wide anti-drug sports campaign, the Nasha-Mukt Jammu and Kashmir Abhiyan. Dr Shahid Iqbal Choudhary, Commissioner-Secretary of the Youth Services and Sports Department, inaugurated the event in Pulwama, with Pampore MLA Hasnain Masoodi (National Conference) and Pulwama MLA Waheed-ur-Rehman Para (PDP) also in attendance.
Eight teams, three days, one objective
The line-up reads like a map of the valley. Pulwama Panthers carry the host district's banner, Midline J&K bring a Pulwama-academy roster, Harmokh Warriors and AR Warriors come down from Bandipora, United Kashmir represents Baramulla, AKC are out of Budgam and Kulgam Tigers fill in from the south. Matches are being played on a temporary mat laid across the cricket outfield, with seating set up around the boundary rope.
An open-category format keeps the entry barrier low: school-age players, college sides and former district-level athletes are all eligible. Organisers have framed the league as a recruiting platform as much as a competition, with the better raiders and cover defenders on the radar of state selectors looking ahead to the Sub-Junior and Senior National Kabaddi Championships later in the year.
A homegrown organiser with a Pro Kabaddi credit
The chief organiser, Aamir Hamid Wani, is the most visible face of the project, and not by accident. The Dadoora-born defender became the first player from Jammu and Kashmir to be picked in a Pro Kabaddi League auction when Jaipur Pink Panthers signed him at his base price of nine lakh rupees ahead of Season 11 in 2024. He has spent the past four years training at the Mid Line Academy in Mumbai, and the league is partly his way of bringing that pathway back home.
Wani's selection in the PKL was treated as a milestone in the valley's kabaddi story. The league he is now putting on is the next step: a structured, three-day window for players in the valley to be seen by coaches and scouts who would not normally make the trip.
Anti-drug push is the larger frame
The J&K Sports Council has been blunt about the bigger goal. Choudhary called sport "a powerful instrument of social transformation" at the inauguration, with the council positioning the kabaddi league as a counterweight to the substance-abuse problem that has worried administrators across south Kashmir in recent years. Football, volleyball and women-only events have been flagged as the next legs of the same campaign.
Final-day matches are scheduled for Sunday at the Pulwama Cricket Stadium. Whoever lifts the inaugural trophy, the more interesting outcome is whether next May still has a Pulwama Kabaddi League on the calendar, with eight teams again or sixteen.
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