Real athletes, real parents, real outcomes. Including the complicated ones.
22 articles
At 15, Ananya Arun competed in the senior state ranking draw and won bronze. She had been at the National Sub-Junior Championship at 13. This is her documented trajectory, and what it shows about the training commitment that produces results like hers.
5 min readShashwat Dalal cleared JEE at 99.9 percentile, played senior BWF events while at DTU and climbed to world rank 155 while studying Computer Science. Then he found the UK university sport pathway. This is what he found and what it means for Indian student-athletes.
6 min readNandini Jain switched from badminton to squash at 11 after an injury, represented India at the Asian Junior Championship twice before she was 14 and cleared JEE Advanced to become part of IIT Madras's historic first sports excellence admission cohort.
8 min readMC Mary Kom, Dipika Pallikal, Somdev Devvarman and Armaan Ebrahim all completed their secondary education through NIOS. Four athletes, five sports, two decades of competition and one board that did not require them to choose between school and training.
7 min readSaurabh Netravalkar was India's leading wicket-taker at the 2010 U-19 World Cup, in a squad with KL Rahul, Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and Shikhar Dhawan. Mumbai's packed senior pace attack left no clear path in. He chose Cornell for a Master's in CS and ended up captaining the USA national team while working at Oracle.
5 min readAman Dhall played table tennis for Uttar Pradesh, faced significant financial challenges studying Sport Management at Loughborough, built a communications career through his UK network and then created the Virendra Kumar Dhall Scholarship (£12,500 per year for Indian student-athletes at Loughborough) so the next athlete would not face what he did.
5 min readHardy Sandhu trained alongside Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma at India U-19 level. An elbow injury ended his cricket. He drove a taxi in Australia and became one of Punjab's biggest music stars. Agnishwar Jayaprakash won six South Asian Games gold medals at 17. He built a drone company that nearly went bankrupt in 2020 and reached $250 million in valuation in 2023. Both stories are about what sport builds that no sport career can take away.
6 min readPan Singh Dhoni wanted his son to get a government job. When MS Dhoni got a railway TTE post through sports quota, his father approved: the cricket and the security were both real. Then his son left the job. What followed was a one-year agreement that settled the question. Pan Singh's journey from caution to complete pride is the structure of how most Indian sports families navigate the same conversation.
9 min readMangte Tonpa Kom, Mary Kom's father, found out his daughter was boxing when her photograph appeared in a Manipuri newspaper after she won a state championship. He had not known. He opposed boxing for a specific reason: he feared it would damage her face and affect her marriage prospects. Three years of accumulated evidence changed his position. His story is a documented account of how a parent's reasonable, real fear updates through evidence rather than argument.
8 min readTiken Borgohain raised three daughters in a village in Assam without the finances for private sports coaching. His twin daughters Lima and Licha competed nationally in Muay Thai. His youngest, Lovlina, showed up to a Sports Authority of India trial at her school in 2012, was spotted by coach Padum Boro and was selected for the SAI centre in Guwahati. Nine years later she won a bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympics. The pathway was government, not private.
8 min readMithali Raj trained in Bharatanatyam for eight years and loved it. Her father Dorai Raj, a warrant officer in the Indian Air Force, brought her to her brother's cricket coaching sessions at 6am to install discipline, not because he had a plan for her to be a cricketer. A coach named Sampath saw her bat, told her father he would make her play for India by 14 and asked for blind support. The father was not convinced. He also did not stop. Mithali Raj played international cricket for 23 years.
7 min readGeeta Phogat won gold at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, the first by any Indian woman wrestler. Babita Phogat won gold at the 2014 Commonwealth Games. They trained under the same father in the same household in the same discipline. After the medals, they went in entirely different directions: Geeta stepped back from elite competition; Babita entered politics. Both choices are valid. The Phogat sisters are a documented answer to the question of what sport leads to.
8 min readJhulan Goswami's family in Chakdaha, West Bengal, was not sure what kind of career their daughter could have in women's cricket in the 1990s. She travelled 62 kilometres by train to Kolkata for practice. When her father Nishit Goswami had money for the fare, she went. When he did not, she missed training. Coach Swapan Sadhu came to the family home and explained what he saw. The parents agreed. Jhulan Goswami went on to take 255 wickets in 204 ODIs, the most in Women's ODI cricket history.
8 min readAnaka Alankamony was world ranked 59 at sixteen and an Arjuna Award winner. In 2013 she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania to study Computer Science and Economics. Her coach Cyrus Poncha understood why, and what he said about it tells you what the US university route in Indian squash actually is.
7 min readIn February 2025, Pullela Gopichand said don't push kids into sport unless you are rich. Most coverage stopped there. The full statement says something different, and the coach who built his career on a Tata Steel job at eighteen has a specific reason for saying it.
7 min readNeha Aggarwal represented India in table tennis from 2001 to 2014 and competed at the Beijing 2008 Olympics. She retired in 2015 and moved to New York for a Master of Science in Sports Management at Columbia University. In early 2017, she came back. She joined Olympic Gold Quest in Hyderabad. Her reason for returning was specific: India lacks professionals with the formation to make good institutional decisions about sport, and she had gone abroad to acquire that formation. She came back to use it.
7 min readNisha Millet went to Perth on an IOC scholarship before the 2000 Sydney Olympics and saw an underwater camera for the first time. She came back, competed at the Games, retired after back surgery and spent twenty years building scientific swimming coaching in Bangalore. Here is what that journey looks like from the inside.
8 min readAmol Muzumdar scored 11,167 first-class runs in domestic cricket for Mumbai and Assam. He never played a Test match for India. He played during the era when Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman and Ganguly occupied the middle-order positions where his runs were being scored. He built a coaching career afterward. In October 2023 he was appointed head coach of the India Women's national cricket team. In 2025, under his coaching, India Women won the ICC Women's ODI World Cup. The domestic career that did not produce a Test cap produced a World Cup instead.
7 min readIndianOil employs over 150 sportspersons including Sharath Kamal, Manika Batra and Hima Das, who was appointed HR Officer at 18 on the basis of her world junior 400m gold. ONGC runs both a scholarship scheme for under-20 athletes and a separate recruitment programme. Bank of Baroda and SBI release sports quota notifications every year. The eligibility threshold at Bank of Baroda explicitly includes junior national championships and Khelo India Games.
9 min readNeeraj Chopra became an Army Naib Subedar at 18, before he had competed at a senior World Championship. Deepak Punia and Amit Panghal both joined the Army through sports quota as JCOs. Bajrang Punia and Vinesh Phogat both held Railway jobs while competing at Olympic level. The route starts at junior national, not at the Olympic podium.
8 min readThere is a large group of athletes who trained seriously at state level, did not make the national squad and are now holding government jobs they reached through competitive exams like SSC CGL, state PSC and banking examinations. They are not famous. No article was written when they cleared those exams. This article is about what their trajectories have in common and why the skills sport builds are directly applicable to what these examinations require.
10 min readAmay Khurasiya cleared the UPSC Civil Services Examination before his ODI debut for India in 1999. He went on to play 119 first-class matches, represent India, coach Kerala to their first-ever Ranji Trophy final and write a book with inputs from Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble. The exam was not a fallback. It was a parallel track he built while still playing.
7 min read