From local courts to global dreams: India's women are rewriting tennis from the ground up

Mint

27-04-2025

On 12 April, as the air crackled with anticipation at the Balewadi Sports Complex in Pune, Sohyun Park and Dabin Kim looked determined to spoil India's party with some textbook counterpunching. The deciding doubles against Prarthana Thombare and Ankita Raina in the last tie in the Billie Jean King Cup Asia-Oceania Group I was effectively a knockout. Of the six teams assembled in Pune for Group I, only two would advance to the playoffs. New Zealand had already booked one spot while India and South Korea tussled for the other.
What short-circuited the South Korean game plan was Thombare's unconventional play. Right from her unusual return stance to her ability to impart direction and power on the ball with almost non-existent backswings, Thombare left her opponents guessing. It was one such stealthy forehand down the line that won India the day and
sent them into the playoffs
of the premier women's team tennis event—known as the World Cup of tennis.
Thombare, whose game is wired for minimum fuss and maximum effect, is known as quite the disruptor on the doubles tour. The quirks in the 30-year-old's game can be traced back to her tennis beginnings.
'There was a time in my life, when I was about 10 years old, when I spent one whole year just hitting against the wall," says Thombare, who represented India in women's doubles, along with Sania Mirza, at the 2016 Rio Olympics. Thombare started her journey in Barshi, a small town in Maharashtra's Solapur district, where even locating a hitting partner, let alone a coach, was impossible at the time. When she started competing, she had to travel 70km, to Solapur town, to fax her entry to tournaments across India.
'I had a slightly longer backswing when I used to play singles, but in doubles you don't have enough time for a load up. But now that I look back, I do feel my short backswing is because the ball comes back much quicker off the wall. I felt like because I did not have the exposure, I trained myself to fix things on my own. Even today when something goes wrong, I go back to the wall because I know it will give me all the answers."
Thombare's rise is emblematic of tennis' spread across the country. While the trend is congruent with the growth of other sports in India, tennis, a club sport at heart, was always viewed as a metropolitan sport played by the urban elite.
In the team that pushed India into the playoffs—for only the second time in the history of the tournament—there were no players from the country's traditional tennis hubs like Chennai or Kolkata, or metros like Mumbai and Delhi. Singles stars Shrivalli Bhamidipaty and Sahaja Yamalapalli were the only ones who come from a city with tennis pedigree—Hyderabad.
India's top singles player Ankita Raina, an Olympian and Asian Games bronze medallist in singles, hails from Ahmedabad, while Vaidehi Chaudhari, who played and won two singles matches during the week, belongs to Mehsana in Gujarat and shifted to Ahmedabad to pursue tennis. Thombare, India's No.1 doubles player since Sania Mirza retired from tennis, comes far from any power centre in tennis. Rutuja Bhosale, who played a big part when India made the playoffs for the very first time in 2020, belongs to Shrirampur, in Maharashtra's Ahmednagar district.
India's reserve player in the 2025 BJK Cup squad and possibly the most exciting prospect from the country for a while, Maaya Rajeshwaran Revathi, 15, comes from Coimbatore. Further down the line, India's reigning U-14 and U-16 national champion is Aahan, from Mendhasala in Odisha.
'That decentralisation has happened. And now, it's a very different ballgame," says India's BJK Cup captain Vishaal Uppal, a former Davis Cupper, born and bred in Delhi.
Even though the national federation, the All India Tennis Association (AITA), has remained largely indifferent to the sport's evolution in the country, some of the state associations have tried to cast a wider net to spot and groom talent. The Maharashtra State Lawn Tennis Association (MSLTA), which volunteered and raised the funds to host the recent BJK Cup in Pune, has pro-actively taken the sport to the masses and created thriving tennis centres in places like Solapur, Kolhapur and Nagpur.
'We have had far better results from the districts than the bigger cities in Maharashtra," says MSLTA secretary Sunder Iyer. 'The success of players like Prarthana has helped. What we have seen is players who come from smaller towns are not technically the best, but these girls are tougher and hungrier. They are physically fitter because even now a lot of them walk to school, they naturally spend a lot more time outside, and because of the small player pool available to them, they start competing with boys at a much younger age.
'And this trend is not just in Maharashtra. Even in states in Karnataka and Haryana, there is a lot more interest in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. The first aspiration is to play tennis, but it is also their ticket out of the place, they want to build their own identity or get jobs."
The game has grown laterally, brought in the numbers. But the lack of a clear pathway and support system, including elite coaches and trainers, means we aren't quite seeing the effect at the very top. There are still no Indians in the top 100 or competing consistently at Grand Slam level, be it singles or doubles.
Tennis remains one of the most expensive sports. Players, even juniors, have to travel, often out of the country, to play the bigger tournaments and earn vital ranking points and climb up the ladder. But even in India, it is no longer the domain of the moneyed.
'It's a myth that tennis is an elite sport," says Uppal. 'It is an aspirational sport now. The problem is, people with the means don't have the drive and desire. And the people with the drive and desire don't have the means."
A shining example of that is Yamalapalli, 24, who took over as India No.1 last year for a while. She started the game with a second-hand racket and learnt the basics off YouTube tennis tutorials. Her first formal coaching lessons came at the age of 14.
'Even after I had finished the 10th standard, I had no national ranking. I barely played any tournaments because we didn't have the money to travel. I would only play the tournaments in the city, and for that also we would go 50km up and down on our Scooty. At the tournaments, everyone else would come in cars, with their coaches, have a full-on professional set-up. But even then we never felt like I could never make it," says Yamalapalli.
A big step up for Yamalapalli was when she went to Sam Houston State University on a tennis scholarship. Her parents had to borrow money from friends, family and well-wishers to buy her the ticket to US. Even as she competed in college tennis and worked towards a degree in food science and nutrition, Yamalapalli hustled to make some money by stringing rackets for all her teammates. It has been a tough journey, but it's one Yamalapalli is proud of.
Busting myths, defying odds. The women have been game for it. Without a player ranked in the top 300, the team has earned a spot in the playoffs. What they need now is a little attention, and consistent support to accelerate the momentum they have gathered.
Deepti Patwardhan is a sportswriter based in Mumbai.