LUCKNOW, June 23 -- Uttar Pradesh Hockey (UPH) on Sunday set a new trend by electing former hockey players as key officials of the body for the next four years during its annual general meeting here. The UPH elected former India star and current chief selector of Indian hockey team, RP Singh, as its president and named former India captain Rajnish Mishra as secretary and former national women player Nisha Mishra as treasurer. "We have started a new trend in sport administration and it shows how much we believe in giving opportunities to actual sportspersons to run the show after quitting playing," newly-elected president RP Singh said. "The UPH has been doing well and has become an integral part of the games' governing body Hockey India as it has hosted junior men's world cup hockey here in Lucknow in 2016 and has regularly been hosting big domestic events of both men and women," said Singh, who also happens to be the director sports, Uttar Pradesh. When RP Singh was the UPH secretary, hockey as well as its players in Uttar Pradesh grew manifolds as not only the senior, junior and sub-junior teams of both men and women stamped their supremacy in the domestic circuit, especially at the National Games, but many of them also made it to the Indian squad. Varanasi's Lalit Upadhyay is a true example of UP's growth in Indian hockey as the forward won back-to-back bronze medals at the Olympics at Tokyo and Paris as being the part of the Indian squads. However, a top-class defender of his time and former captain Rajnish Mishra promised to take up the game of hockey to new heights in Uttar Pradesh. "I would like to follow in the footsteps of RP Sir, who has done great to the sport in the state," Mishra said. "Many of our boys from Uttar Pradesh have been part of the Indian teams and camps as even in the past Uttar Pradesh had been the backbone of Indian hockey as we had our seniors like legendary Major Dhyan Chand and Kunwar Digvijay Singh Babu," Mishra added. "It's a big responsibility on my shoulders to take hockey and hockey players of Uttar Pradesh forward," he said. Other office-bearers in the UPH included Abhijit Sarkar, Sudharma Singh, Sanjay Gautam, Subodh Khandkar, Rajinder Pal Singh, Neelam Singh, Arshi Parveen Siddiqui, Avinash Srivastava, DP Singh, P devendra, Gopal Narayan Mishra, Tripti Awasthi, Menka Tank, Kirti Bhadauriya, Raj Kamal, Anil Vikram Singh, Hanuman Pratap Singh, Rakesh Sharma, Sarika Srivastava, S Shahid and Rashmi Singh....