What ails Indian tennis? Nearly nobody in top-300s

[knarayen]

Actually both Anand and Amanpreet make good points. I can vouch for Anand personally. The guy was as cool as anyone on the clutch points and had an uncanny ability in shot selection at critical points. Helped Vijay a lot with it too.

When we compare with Badminton’s success, we can see what an impact Pullela Gopichand had , single-handedly transform8ng Indian badminton. The NIS tennis coaches program is actually quite good and it needs to be beefed up to include some modern techniques. This needs focused funding. Chandra came out of that and moved straight into BAT to coach Leander there. Chandra is retired now, but he could be brought back to coach the next generation of coaches. All it takes is one or two very good coaches and trainers and a 8-10 cohort of serious students who will die for their coach. That’s how the badminton team was built. And Hopman’s legendary Aussies came up the same way.

Making it a numbers game as a mass sport is more like shooting fish in a bowl. Ain’t gonna happen with tennis.

[Sanjay]

It seems like everyone is just lamenting and being worried, but I see no plans put forth.

It all comes down to catching kids early, coaching them up and getting sponsored to play tournaments. For that we need tennis to be easily accessible, at least in the big cities. I come from Mysore which has a good number of national level tennis player and I remember bumping into P Srinath when I was at a friend's place. Even then, tennis was very exclusive. You had to go to Mysore Tennis Club which was 12+ km away or CFTRI courts which needed "pull". We made our own courts and made bats out of wood to pretend to play tennis. This was during McEnroe's prime years.

One of my friend's son came up to Futures and I think he's played Challengers but he's also fizzled out and joined a US Univ to play tennis there.

[jayakris]

^^^ Srinath was ranked as high as #310 and is somebody I wish others had picked up as a traveling coach. He does coach some, but has not been instrumental in anybody's development that I know of. But you need to have passion for tennis to become a coach - as I am sure Indian kids cannot afford a big salary for a traveling coach (normally). Most of our former players are from reasonably well-to-do background and would not consider a few years of struggle to develop a player.

Suraj Prabodh and Prajwal Dev are two recent guys from Mysuru, but neither reached the levels they probably could've reached if they had got any kind of traveling coaching.

[knarayen]

Vijay Amritraj has been re-elected president of TNTA

https://sportstar.thehindu.com/tennis/v ... itraj,TNTA)%20for%20another%20three%20years.

anybody with knowledge of his plans?

[sameerph]

Vijay Amritraj has been re-elected president of TNTA

https://sportstar.thehindu.com/tennis/v ... itraj,TNTA)%20for%20another%20three%20years.

anybody with knowledge of his plans?

Not quite sure about his overall plans but he did say he wants to bring in more tournaments and he did bring WTA tour tournament back to India after a long time last September. Also there is a mens challenger on calender in February. I am not sure apart from that if he is doing anything to change things at grassroot level for Tamil Nadu tennis.

[Omkara]

No sure where to post this. Chose this topic. Mods can transfer it elsewhere. We need a thread for just general discussions on Indian tennis.

This week was an interesting one. Lots of SF and Finals in both singles and doubles. But no cherry. However, quite a few good wins. Looks like we might have a few top 300 soon.

[arjun2761]

Actually, we only have Sumit in the top 300 next week. Sahaja, Ankita, and Ramk are close and Sumit is in the top 100 but our depth is quite poor right now.

[Omkara]

Sahaja would make it. Others are close. Ramk and Ankita may make one more attempt, though RamK is now more focused on doubles. Vaidehi and Ms Adkar may also make the cut soon.

There is hope. Vs little or no hope over a long time.

[Atithee]

Come on.. these rankings don’t mean much. Look at all the recent results. Despite being top seeds and having hundreds of ranking point differences, they all lost. We can find all the excuses we want, but these rankings are useless. There’s still no hope for Indian tennis even if the recent results are relatively better.

[Omkara]

Dubte hue ko tinke ka sahara

[Atithee]

Dubte hue ko tinke ka sahara

Chor ki dadhi mein tinka bhi ho sakta hai

[Sanjay]

We need to take some ideas from how the cricket team went from being a joke to a top power. Not everything can be used but some could be. Starts with money and infra. And identifying talent, bringing them to academies funded by moneybags like Ambani/Adani and sending them to tournaments and other foreign coaching.