The Pune Metropolitan District Tennis Association (PMDTA) has come up with a unique initiative to empower select and deserving Indian doubles tennis players with the necessary wherewithal to pursue Tour and Challenger Titles--the programme is aimed at harnessing such talents and preparing them to be able to win bigger slam titles and Olympic medals for future. The PMDTA has also roped in Rohan Bopanna as a mentor for this unique initiative.
The programme is named "Doubles Dream of India" and is a value-added programme for the Indian "Doubles Players" ranked in the Top 200 in the ATP Doubles Rankings. The objective of this programme is to provide a support system including travelling coaches and physios for these players to excel and fully focus on maximizing their chances of winning more and more ATP Challenger and Tour titles eventually.
The ten Players who are currently benefiting from this programme are Ramkumar Ramanathan, Rohan Bopanna, Saketh Myneni, Yuki Bhambri, N. Sriram Balaji, Divij Sharan, Arjun Kadhe, Purav Raja, Jeevan N, and Anirudha C.
"We began this program as a pilot project in April 2022 and focused on the ATP Challenger Circuit primarily being played in Europe, USA and South America from April to November 2022. We started providing top-notch travelling Physios and Coaching help to a specific group of Indian Men's Doubles players and helped them perform better including several Challenger Titles. Rohan (Bopanna) with his connections across the globe has made this unique idea a reality and I am happy that we could come together to create something concrete and successfully ensure constructive help is rendered to several Indian Tennis players including Divij Sharan, Ramkumar Ramanathan, Saketh Myneni Yuki Bhambri among others. All these players have given excellent feedback for the help received in our last camp too," said Kishor Patil, CEO of KPIT Technologies and President, PMDTA the brain behind this unique initiative.
"As most of these players currently travel on their own and don't get the required support or guidance when playing the tournaments, such a programme was the need of the hour. The program specifically sends this support to them while on the Challenger circuit to help them perform better," explained Sundar Iyer, Founding Secretary of PMDTA and Hon Secretary General of MSLTA.
The PMDTA through its office bearers headed by Kishor Patil (President), Sunder Iyer (General Secretary), Abhishek Tamhane (Secretary) and Kaustubh Shah aims to make this programme a platform that can contribute to bringing glory to the nation by winning medals for India.
The success of the pilot project gave the PMDTA team confidence to go for bigger plans and extend such help to more and more benefactors. As part of this initiative, PMDTA has also roped in a new sponsor, Avenues Capital to come on board for the program and further enhance the initiative and make it more widespread for Indian Doubles Tennis players.
"We recently conducted a pre-season camp in Dubai for all the players and brought everybody under one roof for a short-term training programme. The camp was successfully conducted from December 12 - 23 and was headed by a World Class Doubles Specialist coach Jeff Coetzee from South Africa who also coached the former World Number 1 pair of Cabal and Farah of Columbia for almost 6 years and helped them win several Grand Slams including the coveted Wimbledon title. As part of this initiative, we also had our assistant coach M. Balchandra and a team of three physios/trainers from India who also were part of this Camp to get some hands-on experience. The camp was extremely well received by the 13 Indian and 2 foreign players that attended the camp," added Rohan Bopanna, who has played a crucial role in promoting the travelling physio and coaches concept for this project as its mentor.
Going forward into 2023 the Program will continue to support the Men's players and will start with the Women's Doubles Program as well. Also, with the Asian Games scheduled this year and the initiative will focus to have players from the programme take a shot at bringing glory to India at the Games as well.
( With inputs from ANI )
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