FanToPark Play.
At 6:15 pm most evenings, a nine-year-old in a Gurugram high-rise sits by the window with his kit bag already zipped up, watching the gate for his father's car. His football class, across town, starts at 6:40. But he can't get there on his own.
Some evenings, the car doesn't show up until well past 7.
This isn't a story about one late father. Across Delhi-NCR, thousands of kids are enrolled in sports academies too far from home to reach by themselves, too far to walk, too far to cycle, too young to take an auto alone. The only way they get there is if a parent drives them. And the only time that parent is free to drive is the same hour Delhi's traffic is at its worst.
"I leave the office by 6 on a good day. On a bad day it's 6:45, and by the time I'm home, get him, and drive there, the class is basically over," said Vishal Rana, whose son was enrolled in a football academy roughly 20 minutes from home if there's no traffic.
On a bad day, in Delhi/Gurugram, that 20-minute drive is a different number entirely. Commuters in the city lost an average of 104 hours to rush-hour traffic in 2025 alone, according to the TomTom Traffic Index. That's over four full days spent stuck on the road in a single year. For a parent trying to get home from Gurugram or Noida and then straight back out again to an academy across town, the evening simply doesn't have enough hours in it.
So the pattern repeats. The kid waits. The class gets missed, or half-missed, or reached so late it isn't worth going to. Eventually, the kid stops packing the bag before being asked to.
"He stopped asking me about football before I even realised what was happening. I thought he'd lost interest. It took me months to admit it wasn't him, it was me stuck on NH-8 every single evening," said Mohit Sharma.
It isn't about parents caring less. A national survey by PUMA and Nielsen found that 53% of Indian children said lack of time, not lack of interest, is the main reason they don't play more sport, ahead of every other reason including cost. The same survey found Indian kids get just 86 minutes of physical activity a week, against the 420 minutes recommended by the World Health Organization.
FanToPark Play, a sports company that runs certified sports coaching classes inside residential societies across Gurugram, Noida, Dwarka and the wider NCR, has a name for parents caught in this exact bind: 6:40PM parents. Because the only way to get their child to a class was always going to depend on beating Delhi's traffic first, and Delhi's traffic doesn't lose.
"The problem was that we were asking a working parent to win a fight against Delhi traffic, every single evening, just so their kid could play. So we brought coaches into the society instead. We
were first focusing on being a marketplace for sports academies and we realised this is not how we will scale. In hindsight, we should have pivoted to this model earlier," said Amit Purohit, Founder, FanToPark.
FanToPark Play's model removes the drive entirely. Certified coaches run sessions directly inside residential complexes, so a child can walk down to a class instead of waiting for a car that traffic keeps delaying. The company currently runs programmes across badminton, football, basketball, tennis, table tennis, cricket, skating, taekwondo and swimming.
For the nine-year-old by the window, that means one thing: no more waiting for the parent to drop them at the academy because the academy comes to them.
About FanToPark
FanToPark builds sports travel, fan experiences and grassroots coaching in India. Its coaching vertical, FanToPark Play, runs certified sports coaching for children inside residential societies across Delhi-NCR.
