By:  Team Mangalorean

Doha Nov 25, 2009: He is not the first to have excelled at such a young age, neither will he be the last, yet every time you see glimpses of a great sportsman in a talented kid  like Dylan D'Souza, you tend to wonder as to what makes him tick.  At 11 years Dylan D'Souza has already tried his hand at Cricket, Tennis, Badminton, Football, Table Tennis and Chess and excelled at most of them.  Yet he probably found his niche at the tender age of seven, when he first set eyes on a scrabble board.  From then on, Dylan entered a fascinating world of vowels and consonants and found he could scrabble them around to his hearts content.  Having mastered that perfect synchronization of mental alacrity and word prowess, he has won many a scrabble game, scoring valuable points (his average is 361 points per game) and earning a place for himself in the championship league. 

Dylan D'Souza is a seventh grader at the Cambridge School in Doha, Qatar.  As a member of the Qatar Scrabble League (QSL), he is part of a team that has been selected to represent Qatar in the Fourth World Youth Scrabble Championships to be held in Malaysia in December 2009.  The selection came after a gruelling three months of endurance training and weekend matches that were conducted by QSL at the International Academy for Intercultural Development.  Eighty of the world's best young scrabble players will compete in this tournament.  The matches will be spaced out from Tuesday 8th December to Thursday 10th December 2009.  As a prelude to the championships, Dylan will be meeting with the Indian Ambassador to Qatar, H.E. Deepa Gopalan on 3rd December 2009. 

Born on June 1st 1998, Dylan is the son of Roy and Amitha D'Souza from Mangalore and has a brother named Jaden who is equally talented.  Dylan has earlier lived in the UAE with his parents and even there, has been actively involved in sports.  His parents are both sports enthusiasts and have encouraged their children to participate in all activities that interest them.  Roy has captained the MIT (Manipal) hockey team in 1987 and has also represented the Mangalore University Hockey Team in 1987.  He is now the Joint Sports Secretary for MCC, Qatar and both he and Amitha are actively involved in all its sports/cultural activities.

Dylan D'Souza

With QSL Chairperson Judith Britten & Mentor -Louella Fernandes 

Qatar Scrabble League 

Dylan (far left) with his scrabble team mates 

Qatar Scrabble League  

However, where their kids are concerned “there is no pressure to excel” say both Roy and Amitha.  As parents they feel it is their duty to encourage and nurture the talent in their children but at the same time they both feel it is unwise to ‘push' the child in that direction.  More often than not, the parents' support and encouragement suffices to bring out the best in any child, they emphasised.  “Both of us love to play all kinds of sports and from a very young age we have exposed our kids to different games, scrabble being one of them,” says Amitha. Roy also adds that when he was young, he received tremendous encouragement from his own father, from whom he learnt both chess and scrabble. 

This sagacious outlook seems to have worked marvels with Dylan as can be clearly seen with the progress he has made so far in the game.  He is a composed and level-headed player and approaches the game with just the right amount of competitiveness. Like all budding sportspersons, he firmly believes in the ‘no pain, no gain' adage and follows it diligently.  He has a training schedule that involves playing once a week at the Qatar Scrabble League.  Other than that he regularly plays on the Internet Scrabble Club (ISC) and with his parents, both practices having helped him tremendously in his game.  Dylan is also an avid reader and reads constantly to improve his vocabulary, which is vital to scrabble.   This diligence combined with his natural affinity and talent is sure to take him places in the long run.  

Mangalorean.com is proud of Dylan D'Souza's achievements and wishes him a bright future in Scrabble, especially in the forthcoming World Youth Scrabble Championship to be held in Malaysia.