There is still no boxing ring in Ramban.
That is worth holding on to, because last week District Ramban won the Girls Overall Championship Trophy at the UT Level Boxing Championship 2026-27 in Srinagar — for the fourth consecutive year. Seven golds, two silvers, two bronzes. Eleven medals, from three schools, in one small district up the Banihal road.
This is a clearly regional story rather than a Jammu-city one: Ramban sits well beyond the belt this site usually covers. It earns the space anyway, because what has happened there is the most replicable thing in J&K school sport right now.
The eleven
The seven gold medallists were Tanvi Katoch, Kajal Devi, Pooja Devi and Sonia Bhagat of Higher Secondary School Ramban; Shevity Katoch and Ronika Devi of BVM Ramban; and Neha Devi of GHS Ramban. Silver went to Sonia Devi (HSS Ramban) and Ragni Suhail (GHS Ramban), bronze to Anjali Devi (GHS Ramban) and Manisha Devi (HSS Ramban).
Three schools. Not an academy with a budget, not a residential centre — three ordinary schools in the same district.
The teacher
The common factor is Sandip Singh Chib, a Rehbar-e-Khel sports teacher with the J&K Youth Services and Sports Department. He coaches at Government Model Higher Secondary School Ramban in the mornings, and in the evenings at a gymnasium he set up himself at Maitra in Ramban. The programme runs under the name Pahadi Sports Academy.
He trains roughly 100 children, about 60 of them girls. Over five years, he estimates he has put around 1,000 children through the programme. Coaching is free. So is the equipment, which he provides.
It did not begin as a queue at the door. “In the beginning, we faced a lot of problems as we had to bring people by force,” he told The Tribune earlier this year, describing a district where no parent was interested in letting a child pursue sport as anything more than a distraction. The obstacles he lists now are more prosaic and more solvable: limited awareness of the sport in the region, equipment costs that families cannot carry, and the missing ring.
What four years of it produces
The medal table is the visible part. The pipeline underneath is the argument.
Samta Devi — three J&K UT golds (2022, 2023, 2024), three inter-college golds, three inter-university appearances, and nationals at Chennai in 2022 and Greater Noida in 2024 and 2026.
Shruti Devi — three J&K UT golds across 2023 to 2025, and nationals at Chennai in 2022 and 2026.
Tanvi Katoch — five J&K UT golds, and national games in several states. She is one of last week's seven.
Sangeeta Devi — three J&K UT golds and nationals at Bhopal.
Kajal Devi — UT medals and the national school games in Delhi. Also one of last week's seven.
Saijal Manhas — selected for the BSF.
Across five years the programme has sent between 10 and 12 athletes to national games, and across four years roughly two dozen to national championships. That last name on the list is the one worth pausing on: for a young woman in Ramban, boxing has turned into a route to a uniformed-service job. Not a metaphorical pathway — an actual appointment.
The thing that is still missing
For all of that, the district trains without a boxing ring. Chib has said one is what Ramban needs next — and it is the kind of gap that decides how far a programme can take an athlete. Ring craft, footwork under ropes, the geometry of cutting off a corner: these are things that can be drilled on a floor only up to a point, and then have to be learned in the ring itself, usually for the first time at a competition where it counts.
The other recurring obstacle he names is cost. Gloves, headgear and hand wraps are not one-off purchases for a growing teenager, and in a district where sport was not an obvious thing to spend money on, the equipment bill was the argument against starting. His answer has been to absorb it — coaching and kit are provided free — which works, and which is also precisely why the programme depends so heavily on one person staying.
Why this matters if you are in Jammu
It is easy to read a district-level medal sweep as a nice local story and move on. The more useful reading is that none of the inputs here are exotic. A Rehbar-e-Khel teacher is a post that exists across J&K. Government schools are everywhere. The differentiators were a coach who stayed for five years, free equipment, and two training slots a day — morning at school, evening at a hall.
If you are at a college in Jammu wondering whether there is a competitive route in a sport nobody around you plays, Ramban is the evidence that the UT-level ladder is genuinely climbable from an ordinary school, and that the bottleneck is usually coaching continuity rather than talent.
What we could not confirm
A few details were not published and we have not printed guesses. The weight categories for any of the eleven medallists were not listed. Nor was the organising body for the championship stated explicitly, the number of districts or boxers who competed, or the runner-up district. The age band is also unstated — the school affiliations imply a sub-junior or junior category, but the reports do not say so, and we are not going to assume it.
