How The New Tennis Leagues Will Help Indian Tennis Players Graduate To The Center Courts

The two new Tennis leagues are crucial to develop talent in the Indian Tennis ecosystem. Here’s why.

At every major Tennis event, there is the center court and then there are side courts. The center court is where the stars of  tennis universe descend to captivate fans with their skills. The side courts are like the gladiatorial arena. Here small time players polish their skills and compete with one another with the aim of one day reaching those center courts. Most of the players who play in these side courts lead a low key existence with a majority fading away without really making any dent in the tennis world.

The world of professional tennis is very cruel. Unless you are one of the center court players survival itself becomes a daily struggle. This is why exposure for a tennis player becomes critical. Unlike a lot of other sports, hours and hours of isolated practice does not make you a better tennis player. Only match practice does.

To ensure players get enough match practice the AITA (All India Tennis Association) has created a busy calendar. Over 40 ITF (International Tennis Federation) and ATP Challenger tournaments take place in India besides the 100s of AITA tournaments. However, most of these tournaments do not even feature a top-100 player. And that is a problem.

Tennis is a funny game. You need to compete with a better player to get better; yet the skill gap between you and your opponent should not be so massive that the opponent completely controls the game. Which is why from a talent development point of view, the two tennis leagues that have started last year are exciting.

To begin with both these leagues, the Vijay Amritraj floated Champions Tennis League(CTL) and the Mahesh Bhupati floated International Premier Tennis League (IPTL) bring center court action to India. For the first time the current center court stars and the legends of the game will “strut their stuff” in India. A budding Tennis player could ask for nothing better than the chance to witness these stars up close.

They would closely watch how Federer prepares for a serve, Sharapova’s follow through action on a backhand or how a Nadal receives a serve. It is the casual fan who should be focused on watching the game, the students of the game would be more focused on dissecting these finer points. After all there is no better learning than observing the masters.

This feeling was also expressed by Shweta Rana, an upcoming Indian tennis player who was part of the 2014 Pune Marathas team in the CTL. She was a junior player in the team and while she did not get any match practice yet the experience itself was enriching. During our chat Shweta said ‘it has been a great opportunity for us to be on the same bench with these players. Being with them and training with them has definitely changed our mindset and has opened us to take up newer challenges.’

These leagues are definitely a positive first step for player development in India, however one must not be naive to think that this is it. India very desperately needs a few high performance tennis centers. These are centers where junior players could be conditioned and polished to deal with the pressure cooker kind of environment that professional tennis is. A former Indian tennis player Ashutosh Singh suggests that “we create and build high performance programs which can then provide a continuous supply chain of young players with solid and developmental processes already imbibed by them so that they can take advantage of the high volume of tournaments that we conduct in the country and graduate from the junior to the senior circuit with ease.”

A project like this would require a large amount of capital. However thanks to these new leagues corporate India has finally started showing some interest in Indian tennis. Now the ball is in AITA’s court to ensure they carry on the interest that the CTL and IPTL have generated.

However even these new leagues have some responsibility to fulfill with respect to Indian tennis. It would be most unfortunate if these new leagues consider their primary job to be just entertainment. Their purpose should be to educate, inspire and develop the next generation of Indian tennis stars. Twenty years from now, when we look back let us hope 2014-15 would be the year when Indian tennis started its journey towards the center courts.