Tara Iyer thread

[PKBasu]

Surprisingly, we haven't started a Tara Iyer thread, although we have been following her here for many years. With her title in Portugal this past weekend, she has fully earned her own thread.

I can do no better than quote Jay's frontispiece in full:

"The first is always the sweetest - Eighteen year old Tara Iyer must be learning that today with her first international pro title, as she won the $10K ITF event in Monemor-O-Novo in Portugal. Seeded second, 452nd ranked Tara Iyer defeated the 4th seed Elisa Balsamo of Italy (#540) by a score of 6-4, 7-6(5) in the final. Tara had beaten the third seed Valentina Sulpizio (ITA,498) in the semifinal yesterday by a dominating 6-1, 6-0 margin and had earlier moved past a talented 7th seed Noppawan Lertcheewakarn (THA,614) to whom she had lost in a $10K semifinal in Jakarta last month. The final today was also an end to a 9 match win streak by Tara's opponent, who had won the title in a similar event last week in Portugal. The Indian was in roaring form this week, not dropping a set in any of her matches.

"Tara is the youngest of the "gang of five" youngsters who emerged in Indian women's tennis about 4 to 5 years back - Sania Mirza, Isha Lakhani, Ankita Bhambri, and Sanaa Bhambri being the others. She was ranked as high as 45th in world junior rankings before she stopped playing at the junior levels a year early and joined the Duke University in the US for one year of studies and college tennis.

"After turning professional last summer, it has taken Tara a few months to start doing well. Over the last two months however, she has reched semifinals in two $10K events in Indonesia (Jakarta and Tarakan), a quarterfinal in a $25K challenger (Thiruvananthapuram) and a semifinal last week in the $10K ITF in Amarante, Portugal. The fine run has seen her move up the ranks from below 600 to the #5 spot among Indians, behind Sania Mirza (#42), Sunitha Rao (#278), Shikha Uberoi (#280) and Rushmi Chakravarthi (#373). Tara appears to be moving fast to the top-350 levels of women's tennis which will make it easy for her to enter challenger level events around the world.
"The title made Tara only the second Indian woman other than Sania in eight years to win a $10K title in Europe. Sandhya Nagaraj had won a $10K in Spain last year at this time. Manisha Malhotra won the last Indian title before that, in UK in 1999. Sania played her last $10K event and won the title at Hempstead, UK in Aug 2004 - and had won ten such titles abroad in four continents. Shikha Uberoi won three in the US (Edmond, FortWorth in 2004 and Harrisonberg in 2003). Sunitha Rao has not won a $10K though she only played a couple of those. As for other titles abroad by Indians, Isha Lakahni had picked up the $10K title in Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand, four years back. Megha Vakharia had an ITF title in Lagos, Nigeria five years back. Before that, Manisha Malhotra won a $10K at Baltimore, USA, in 2000 and one each at Harrisonberg, USA and Sunderland, UK in 1999. Sai Jayalakshmy won her lone title abroad in Algeria in 2002. Though she has a bucketload of titles in India, Rushmi Chakravarthi has never won an ITF title abroad, going down to Sania in a final once - at Jakarta in late 2003. The Bhambri sisters - Ankita and Sanaa - have not won a title abroad yet. Winning one in Europe is an even tougher job, and it is heartening to see young Tara coming through."

[usaindian]

great win and nice article

[sameerph]

Excellent win by Tara . Last few months she was begining to get a lot more consistent in her game & has now come up with a title overseas which is quite rare even at this level for Indians.

Her streight sets win in the final was quite notable as although her opponent was ranked lower she had a won a title only last week & was ranked at a high of 339 just a year back. Thus , she was cleraly a top 350 type player & good to see Tara beat her convincingly. I don't know if it is a coincidence but her performance level has gone considerably higher ever since she was selected as a part of fed cup team this April. We all thought at that time that her selection was a bit hasty but perhaps she has got a shot of confidence from that.

With this win she will move inside top 400 & with confidence gained should go much higher in the months to come.

Excellent piece of article, Jay.  . I hope other players from that " gang of five" - Isha, Ankita & Sanaa also make a upward movement soon.

[jayakris]

Thanks for starting the thread, sameer.  I said I will start a thread today, had to run somewhere, and promptly forgot about it ... 

Yeah, perhaps the Fed Cup also helped to make her think that she "belongs" and it was time to show it.  Great job by Tara.

But she should also know that she is feeding the monster! -- We are insatiable here.  All it takes now are probably three outings at QF or less for us to say that she is "stagnating" and needs focus to "get over the hump".  Now we want to see her near 300, don't we?

Jay

[jaydeep]

So with that Tara won her first futures title in his first futures final ... Very good result considering this title she won in Europe.

Thanks Jay for excellent piece of article ... This is really great beginning to see how Tara build her career on these good results ... When last time I watched her playing at Pune, her dad was taking notes of each points which she was playing (winning or losing) ... And while talking with them I found out that they did this task in every match she played to find out her weak areas ... I feel their hard work is started to give them desired results.

Jaydeep.

[sunitarao]

Great show by Tara.  She is one girl who can go far. This may be just the begining. Well done.

[sameerph]

Article on Tara in Hindu :-

http://www.hindu.com/2007/06/21/stories ... 322000.htm

Nice to see her setting her goals high talking about reaching top 200 by yearend.

[amr090]

she looks pretty athletic too...

[Omkara]

Good to see her setting goals. But she needs 100 odd points to achieve that.Just checked the WTA website... she is ranked 439 with 40.75 points.This does not include points she won in Portugal. So i guess there is 10-12 odd points to add to the tally. This will take her rank to some where around 380. To get into the top 200 she needs this points tally to reach 150+. Stiff target

[Insider]

Top-200 is nothing in shallow women's tennis.  Hopefully Tara has set a higher career goal than that.

[jayakris]

Top 200 or 250 is not unrealistic by year end though tough.  She only said year-end.  I am sure she has much higher career goaols.

She will need a couple of challenger semis or finals, a couple of challeger quarters, and may be even a couple more $10K titles if she plays any more $10Ks.  She should.  Should play at least another 3-4 more this year to keep some wins going unlesss she is fully comfortable with enough wins at the challenger levels.  Playing some easier matches where you have the liberty to make some mistakes and fine-tune your lesser-percentage shots is something many Indians do not put much value on, and this is a reason why many stagnate.  Jumping ahead too much too fast, will often cause you only playing pressure-matches.

Jay

[amr090]

a key example of this are the uberois especially shikha who stubbornly refuses to play lower level events.  i think she has wasted about 3 years now, stagnating for a while and then plummeting even lower by repeatedly playing only qualifiers and relatively few (read none) challengers or futures.  had she played more of these in the last few years there is no doubt in mind she would be top 100 right now.

[jayakris]

Having one great week at the US Open really proved to be a bad thing for Shikha.  Worse still, she kept on getting a few good top-150 wins after that too, which made her believe that she should be looking for the big wins.  Can't blame her for that, but one needs to come down to lower levels every now and then to work on things.  I wish she would do that.

Neha is also in somewhat of a same boat, though she is yet to have breakthrough weeks at high levels like Shikha had.  Please play some challengers Neha...

This is why I like it when Sania picks some of the Tier-III events in weeks when she could try for the bigger events, though sometimes apperance money also helps her make the decision ....

The flip side of it is that coming down to the next level also does not prove fruitful sometimes, because one finds it tough to motivate oneself against some good player (or an upcoming player) who is all fired up against you.  Harsh Mankad had trouble at the futures level on a few occasions too, like this.  Then you are not helping yourself because you have neither got the match practice, nor any points or prize money.

Tara has some careful and calculated decisions to make on playing $10K events from hear on out. Too early to think of jumping up, for sure.

Jay

[sameerph]

Yes, Tara should keep on playing more of $ 10 K events & try to win 2-3 more of them to get the confidence further up. She can mix in a few challangers in between. Once she gets to top 300 , she can move totally to challanger events.

I agree that moving too much ahead too early is not good. Take the example of Sania for instance. She won her first $ 10 k event in September 2002 . But after that she kept on playing these events for almost 2 years till September 2004 & winning most of them. Inspite of the fact she may have had the ranking & the confidence to do so, she hardly played any challanger events abroad.

In fact she played  only 2 $25K events , 2 $ 50 k events & 1 $ 75k event abroad before making the big jump to WTA tour events & grand slams in 2005.

Of course , Sania was much younger at that time . Tara may not have that much time as she is already 19. One wasted year due to playing in college may have set her back a bit. Other wise , I suppose she was just a bit behind Sania during junior days.

[amr090]

Not to get too off topic but I think Indians really schedule their tournaments horribly for the most part.  Being a business consultant whose job is to help clients make strategic decisions to grow profitably by maximizing strengths and minimizing weaknesses I have to analyze this.

It seems there are multiple tournaments going on at any time in the world where the cuts are very very low and all a reasonably good indian player would need to do is to make it to that tournament and they would be assured of going very deep in it.

If I was an up and coming player just starting on the tour, I would try to go to the weakest available tournaments first to rack up easy points and build my confidence up.  Once I got my ranking inside the top 350 or so playing events where the challenge is low I would cautiously start to mix in tougher events till I could gradually increase my ranking with both tough and cupcake tourneys.  Once I built my rank up I would enter big events.


Indian players seem to go to lengths to do quite the opposite.  Despite limited funds they go to the toughest events get horribly beaten and if they're lucky maybe win a round. They lose both their limited financial resources and do not benefit from any points ranking boost.  Ive seen Indian players repeatedly playing events in US and Europe where points are the most hard to get, when easy points are there for the picking in Africa, Asia and South America.