Sometimes a story does more than just get read — it stays with people.
When The Better India shared the story of India’s Women’s Ice Hockey Team and their historic bronze medal win, it wasn’t just about a match scoreline.
It was about a group of women in Ladakh who built their own rink, layer by layer, in the middle of the night — and about the grit it took to keep skating on it, even when the world told them to stop.
And what followed reminded us why storytelling matters.
What the story was about
The team’s journey began in 2016, when India competed internationally in women’s ice hockey for the very first time, largely on borrowed gear and unyielding self-belief. Training conditions were harsh — cracked natural ice, barely any institutional support, and a short window each year when the ponds froze over enough to play on at all.
Players and organisations like the Ladakh Women’s Ice Hockey Foundation worked through the cold to prepare the ice by hand, often overnight, just so there was somewhere to practice.
Along the way, many of the players were mocked, sidelined, and told to quit. But they didn’t.
Nine years after that first international outing, the persistence paid off: the national team secured its first-ever bronze medal at the 2025 IIHF Women’s Asia Cup in Al-Ain, UAE, with 19 of the 20-member squad hailing from Ladakh and one from Himachal Pradesh, defeating Thailand 3–1 in the third-place playoff.
The impact
After the story was shared on The Better India’s platform, it resonated with over 2,85,000 people (as on 10 July 2026) — many of whom said this was the first time they had even heard that India had a women’s ice hockey team.
But beyond the numbers, what stood out was the response.
Readers wrote in to say the story had shifted something in how they thought about Indian sport — that it wasn’t only cricket or the more visible disciplines that deserved a place in the national imagination.
Many shared the story further, wanting friends and family to know about a team that had built its own rink at midnight and still made it to a podium.
For a story about players from remote Himalayan settlements, this reach mattered: it meant the team’s journey was travelling to audiences far beyond where they had ever competed.
The team joined host Amitabh Bachchan on stage for a special National Sports Day episode of Kaun Banega Crorepati Season 17. Photograph: (The Better India)
That growing visibility is part of what eventually carried the team’s story all the way to Kaun Banega Crorepati Season 17, which dedicated a special National Sports Day episode to the team, inviting the players to join host Amitabh Bachchan on stage.
Bachchan, in turn, called it the most honoured moment of his career, admitting on his blog that he hadn’t previously known India had a women’s ice hockey team, let alone one that had just won bronze — and reflecting on how no one had believed in this team, yet they had proved everyone wrong.
For readers who had followed The Better India’s original coverage, watching the team go from an unfamiliar name in an article to guests on one of India’s biggest television stages felt like watching a story they’d helped carry along the way.
Stories like these remind us that impact doesn’t always come from big gestures. Sometimes, it begins with readers choosing to notice a team the rest of the country had overlooked — and that noticing, shared enough times, can turn into a nation finally watching.
