She Chose Penn Over the Pro Tour: Anaka Alankamony, Cyrus Poncha and What the US University Route Actually Is
Anaka 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.
In the fall of 2013, Anaka Alankamony enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania.
She was nineteen. She had won Asian Games team medals in 2010 and 2014. She had set a world record in 2009 as the youngest player to win a WISPA title on the professional women’s squash tour. Her career-high world ranking was 59. She was the Arjuna Award winner for 2014.
She enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania and studied Computer Science and Economics.
Anaka Alankamony, Indian squash player who attended the University of Pennsylvania
What She Was Before She Enrolled
Before writing about what Anaka Alankamony chose, it helps to be specific about what she was before she chose it.
She started competing internationally as a junior. Her first major win came at the Asian Under-15 circuit at thirteen. In 2008, she won the Asian Junior Squash Individual Championship in Korea. In 2009, at fifteen, she won a WISPA title on the professional women’s tour and set a world record as the youngest player to do so.
She reached a career-high ranking of 59. She won a team bronze at the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou and a team silver at the 2014 Asian Games in Incheon. She received the Arjuna Award in 2014.
This is not the profile of a player who defaulted to the university route because the professional circuit did not work out. This is the profile of a player who reached the top tier of Indian squash as a junior, competed internationally at senior level and then chose, at nineteen, to enrol at Penn.
That choice is what this article is about.
Cyrus Poncha and What He Built
Cyrus Poncha is an Indian squash coach based in Chennai. He was a nationally ranked junior player himself and chose coaching over a professional playing career at eighteen. He has coached at the ICL-TNSRA Squash Academy in Chennai for decades.
He has won the Asian Squash Federation Coach of the Year award six times. In 2005, the Government of India awarded him the Dronacharya Award, the highest honour given to coaches in Indian sport, presented by President APJ Abdul Kalam.
The players Poncha has coached at elite level include Joshna Chinappa and Dipika Pallikal Karthik, who won gold together at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow; Saurav Ghoshal, who became India’s highest-ranked male squash player; Harinder Pal Sandhu; Velavan Senthilkumar; and Anaka Alankamony.
When Anaka enrolled at Penn, she was carrying the product of years of coaching inside a system that Poncha and others had built: the technical foundation, the competitive experience and the result history that made Ivy League recruitment possible.
What UPenn Offered
The University of Pennsylvania is an Ivy League university in Philadelphia. Like all Ivy League schools, it does not offer athletic scholarships. What it offers instead is need-based financial aid, generous enough in many cases to cover most or all of tuition for admitted students whose families qualify. For international students including Indian students, Penn’s financial aid policy is the same as for domestic students.
The women’s squash team at UPenn competes at the highest level of college squash in the United States. For a player at Anaka’s level, the combination of her competitive results and her academic qualifications made her a viable candidate for admission and for the squad.
She enrolled in the College of Arts and Sciences and studied Computer Science and Economics. She played on the Penn women’s squash team throughout her undergraduate years.
The Trade-Off That Was Real
What happened to her world ranking during the Penn years is documented and worth naming directly.
Her career-high ranking was 59. By 2014, a year after she enrolled, her ranking had dropped to 151. This is what happens when a player does not play the professional circuit regularly. The ranking system tracks competitive results, and if you are studying at Penn rather than playing tournaments across the professional tour, your ranking declines.
This is the specific trade-off that the US university route involves in any sport where the professional circuit and the university calendar compete for the same time. Anaka was not on the professional tour between 2013 and approximately 2017. She was at Penn.
The ranking she had built, career-high 59, hard-won on the professional circuit, was not the endpoint she was aiming for. The ranking was evidence that she was good enough to be recruited. After recruitment, it served its purpose.
What Poncha Said About It
Cyrus Poncha has spoken about Indian squash players taking the US university route. His stated position is specific.
“They get scholarships from good universities to study, and from their perspective, it’s a huge opportunity that is difficult to forgo.”
He added: “Almost every university gym has squash courts. Squash courts are part of most universities’ gyms as well.”
He also acknowledged the other side of it: India loses competitive talent when players make this choice. He expressed hope that players would return to the professional circuit after completing their studies, noting that some had done so.
The word “difficult” in his quote matters. He is not describing the choice as obviously wrong. He is describing it as a genuine opportunity, one that from a player’s perspective is hard to turn down when the alternative is continuing on a professional circuit that offers no guaranteed employment or income security.
His background is relevant here. He chose coaching at eighteen over a professional playing career. He spent decades building players through a system with limited infrastructure and uncertain professional rewards. He knows what the professional squash career in India looks like, in detail, because he has watched it from the inside. When he says the US university route is difficult to forgo, he is speaking from that context.
What Came After
Anaka Alankamony graduated from the University of Pennsylvania around 2017. She is currently a Software Engineer at Microsoft, working on Bing Ads Editor.
The combination of elite squash developed in India under coaches like Poncha, an Ivy League education in computer science and economics and the discipline that competitive international sport builds produced a specific outcome: a career at one of the largest technology companies in the world.
This is not the same as what a continuing professional squash career would have produced. It is different, and it was chosen deliberately.
What the Pattern Is
Anaka Alankamony: The Cyrus Poncha–US Pathway
Cyrus Poncha did not just coach squash. He built a pathway for his athletes to the US university system.
Anaka Alankamony was not the first Indian squash player to take this route. She was not the last.
Indian squash players have competed at American universities going back decades. Players connected to the Indian squash ecosystem have appeared at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia and UPenn across multiple generations. Poncha noted in his interviews that this has become a documented pattern: Indian players have been getting scholarships to US universities, making the move and building careers there.
The pattern exists because the Indian squash system, through coaches like Poncha, through competitive junior infrastructure and through events like the Asian Junior Championships, produces players at a level that is visible internationally. Ivy League squash programmes do not recruit from nowhere. They recruit players who are already ranked, already winning at Asian or international level and already demonstrably serious athletes.
The talent has to exist before the recruitment becomes possible. The coaching that builds the talent is what makes the US university route available in the first place.
What This Means for the Pathway
The US university route in squash is not a fallback. It is a pathway that requires the same level of performance investment as the professional route, up to the point of recruitment.
The difference is what happens after recruitment. On the professional squash circuit, the investment continues into an uncertain professional career with income volatility and no educational qualification being built simultaneously. On the US university route, the investment converts into a degree from a university that is competitive with the best institutions in the world, while sport continues at the highest level of college competition.
Anaka’s career-high ranking of 59, achieved at sixteen, is evidence of what the Indian squash development system is capable of producing. Poncha’s Dronacharya Award is evidence of what sustained coaching commitment produces in players over time.
The Microsoft outcome is evidence of what that combination, properly directed, can build.
What to Do This Week
If you are a squash player at the competitive national or sub-national level: research the College Squash Association at csasquash.com to understand which US universities run varsity squash programmes and what level of player they recruit. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UPenn, Columbia, Cornell and Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut) are among the programmes with documented histories of recruiting top international players. Contact athletic departments directly with your world or national ranking, your tournament results and your academic profile. Anaka's profile when recruited (Asian Junior Champion, world-record WISPA title, world ranking in the top 60) is a benchmark. Understand what each programme's recent recruits look like, and build toward that standard.
If you are a parent or athlete weighing the professional circuit against the university route: Anaka's documented trade-off is specific and worth understanding in full. Her ranking dropped from 59 to 151 while she was at Penn. That drop was not failure. It was the cost of four years of investment in a degree from one of the world's best universities. The question is not whether the ranking will drop. The question is what will exist at the end of those four years. She had a degree in Computer Science and Economics and a job at Microsoft. Know what you are giving up and what you are getting before you treat the ranking decline as a loss.
If you are a squash coach or parent with a junior player showing international-level potential: the US university route requires the same competitive foundation as the professional route. There is no alternative path to US university squash that does not go through serious competitive performance at the junior level. Poncha built Anaka through the competitive Indian junior system to world #59 before the university pathway opened for her. The coaching investment comes first. The university pathway becomes available because of what the coaching produced, not independently of it.