Know your Sports - Squash

After popular sports like cricket, football and tennis, Squash in the country has gathered momentum. The city of Mumbai can boast of a few well equipped squash courts with adequate facilities - for instance, the CCI and Bombay Gymkhana squash players from different parts of the country converged to Mumbai recently to display their striking prowess and power play.

Having won the CCI titles convincingly top seeded Ritwik Bhattacharya of Delhi dethroned defending champion Saurav Ghosal of Tamil Nadu to regain the men's crown, while Joshna Chinappa of Tamil Nadu retained the women's title, in the 53rd Senior National and 30th Bombay Gymkhana Maharashtra State Open Squash Championships 2005. 

 We had Ritwik Bhattacharya - India's best men's player, Joshna Chinnapa - the World Junior No. 2 and India's best Women's player, Dipika Palikal the European No. 1 in the U-15 category and many of India's top players in their respective categories.

You have been traveling extensively as a player. Could you narrate your experiences?
I have been privileged to have experienced squash as a top Junior player, Top Senior player, represented India in many squash championships overseas and been a national coach for the Indian Junior team for a few years (took junior teams to the World Junior Championships in 1992 in Hong Kong and in 1994 to New Zealand and in 1995 won the Silver Medal at the Asian Junior Championships in Singapore) and now actively involved in an administrative capacity as Hon. Secretary Squash at the CCI. My association with squash has been very satisfying.

Could you elaborate on your Australian-Asian tour?
The first time I represented India was at the World Amateur Squash Championships in Australia in 1979. We finished 7th in the team event which was a very good performance considering that we had practically no international exposure to speak of. Thereafter I played in four Asian Squash Championships in Malaysia, Pakistan and Jordan. We won the Silver in each of these events. We learnt a lot at these events from other players and came back and would incorporate these learnings into our training sessions, etc. They were very good experiences.

For some reason there has been a decline in top quality players emerging from the CCI since the last decade or so. We at the CCI have started a Squash Academy three years ago with the express mission to nurture our kids to become National Champions and more. We have excellent facilities at the CCI and have the full support of the Club Management and Mr. Raj Singh Dungarpur the President of the Club. We have an extensive training program which is overseen by Neil Harvey (coach of former World No. 1 Peter Nicol) who visits a few times each year and we all work closely with India's National Champion and World No. 59 Ritwik Bhattacharya who provides his guidance to the players and serves a role model to our juniors. The results are already showing and we anticipate that in the near future we will see Champions emerging once again from the CCI.

We are on the threshold of anther New Year full of new opportunities to make headway in the field of sports. Looking back at 2005, it had been quite a creditable achievement for a handful of sports person in the country. Sania Mirza stood out head and shoulders for her tremendous performance in tennis. Others to follow suit have been Anju Bobby George, Anand Vishwanathan, Pankaj Advani, the Kabaddi teams (men and women) and Sachin Tendulkar-the Bombay Bomber who holds the world record for the most number of Test centuries - 35.

I've asked myself why can't India become a nation of outstanding sports personalities in the world arena? The gap between available talent and achievement in India is huge. The blame for this lies mainly in lack of adequate infrastructure and equipments needed to lift our players/teams to the next level. I remember coming across a University of Western Australia which pioneered the development of Sports Science and retains a reputation in exercise, health and sports science both nationally and internationally. Little wonder then Australia qualified for the World Cup Football 2006 after several attempts. It was basically their mind set of winning and working towards excellence in management and team operations.

Without a shadow of doubt, cricket in India has been the most popular sport. However, in the cricket academies an education of psychology for youngsters would be greatly beneficial. Nowadays - sledging and taunting of players on the field has become the order of the day and young turks getting into the Indian cricket team should be mentally tough to encounter the situation. While several Indian psychologists with different backgrounds (clinical, counselling, organizational psychology) have offered their services and probably good at what they do; only a few are even aware of the vast literature available on applied psychology in sport.

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