Life Line
- Oct 13, 2021

#33 Ashreen Mridha 🇧🇩 - Women’s empowerment through basketball

Listen to Ashreen Mridha just below or on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Podcasts.

🎤 “As I grew up, I always found myself asking the difficult questions. Why can't we get this opportunity? Why aren't we getting paid? Why are the men getting paid and the women not getting paid? So I used to ask these questions to the Federation and the Federation would really hate me. They would tell me: ‘Why are you asking so many questions? You just keep quiet and play’.

But I was always the one arguing, fighting, constantly poking and trying to fight for the girls, because a lot of people don't have the courage to speak. I was always the one who was speaking and hence I became an enemy for all these organizations.

There were times when I used to feel like ‘why am I the only one who's speaking? Would there ever be any other girl also speaking with me?’ So that was a bit frustrating for me, but now, you know, from 2009 till 2021, now I can see a lot of these girls fighting and asking these questions”.

🇧🇩 Ashreen Mridha is the former captain of Bangladesh national basketball team and co-founder of Deshi Ballers, a women-led organization on a mission to:

-empower women and girls through basketball;

-advocate for equal rights for women to access sports;

-and promote basketball in a cricket and football-dominated country.

🏀 She walks us through her journey from discovering basketball as a school kid to creating the first university’s women league and joining the first-ever national women team.

💪 She shares how basketball taught her the values of teamwork, care and discipline, how she grew the Deshi Ballers community and her dreams to set up the first national women’s basketball league in Bangladesh!

Hope you are as excited as me to learn more about empowerment through sports!

❤️ TIMELINE:

12’ - The pioneer of women basketball in Bangladesh

25’ - Basketball teaches you teamwork and discipline

36’ - A good coach can train you to get better, a great coach can change your life

46’ - Learning from the San Antonio’s Spurs through the Global Sports Mentoring Program

56’ - The birth of Deshi Ballers and its recipe for success

73’ - Impact stories of Deshi Ballers

94’ - Empowering the next generation of women basketball players in Bangladesh

🗒️ REFERENCES:

Follow Deshi Ballers on Facebook and Instagram

About the Global Sports Mentoring Program.