Kodai Open Soccer Tournament

Kodai Open Soccer Tournament previously known as the Diwali Open happens during the month of October / November every year. It is one of the most exciting and well organized tournaments in the town of Kodaikanal. This is a major tournaments where our students, staff, alumni and the local clubs in Kodaikanal come together to put up their best talents and exibit great sportsmanship. This is a knock-out week long tournament. The preliminary round happens within the school with students from grades 8-12, with a staff team playing a league to qualify for the tournament. The tournament includes 16 teams out of which 4 teams are from KIS. This year after a hard fought battle the 4 teams that made it to the tournament from KIS were the A team, grade 10 team, the X team and the grade 11 team. The remaining 12 teams were from outside. An interesting feature of this year's Kodai Open was that some of our visiting alumni who had come to partipate in a week long alumni visit had played in the A team when they were students in this school under coach Mr Sither. They made a great effort to travel from different parts of the world to come back and participate in the tournament. We also had a team from Bangalore from Indus School whose coach, Mr Gelek, is also an alumini of KIS.


The preliminary round games were officiated by Mr Sither and other staff of the PE dept. From pre quarters we had officials coming from the Dindigul football association to officiate. All matches had their share of excitement. Some did victory laps around Bendy and some shed tears of sadness. The final was a great moment of excitement for both the local crowd and the school students. It was played between our A team and the local favorites Kodai Mario Rockers. We had lots of interruptions during the game; it rained heavily in the first half but still our boys managed to score first, the opening goal was scored by our captain Varun Varadaraj. The final score was 1-1. There was absolute silence from the spectators when the penalty shoot outs were taken, and finally a huge cheer from the student body along with staff, coach and friends running to congratulate the winning A team boys. The final score was 3-1.

The chief guest was our acting Principal, Mr Kaisar Dopaishi who handed over the trophies and medals to the runners up and winners. Mr Sither HoD PE dept, made the vote of thanks and congratulated both the teams.


Marvin Ambrose
PE department