Two Asian Junior Championships Before 14, JEE Advanced at 17: The Nandini Jain Story
Nandini 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.
In January 2025, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras announced that it had admitted five national-level athletes under its Sports Excellence Admission programme. It was the first time any IIT in India had done this.
The admission conditions were not modified. All five students had cleared JEE Advanced, the same examination required of every other IIT undergraduate, at the same standard. The Sports Excellence Admission did not create a lower threshold. It created a formal category that recognised athletes who had already cleared JEE at the standard required and had also reached national or international competitive level in their sport.
One of those five students was Nandini Jain, 17, from Delhi. She had represented India at the Asian Junior Squash Championship in 2018 and 2019. She had won gold at the School Games Federation of India in both individual and team events. Before all of that, she had been a state-level badminton player.
She was now enrolled in B.Tech Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras, class of 2028.
Nandini Jain, IIT Madras student and squash player who competed at Asian Junior level
It Started With Skating
Nandini Jain started skating at age three. She also swam. At five, she found badminton and moved quickly through early competitive levels, reaching state competition in Delhi.
Then came a setback that had nothing to do with performance.
At approximately age five or six, she developed tennis elbow, overuse pain in the upper arm near the elbow joint that is common in young players in racquet sports, particularly those with high training volumes. The medical advice was not to reduce training. It was to stop entirely.
Stopping a sport you are competitive in at that age, when the sport is central to your identity and your routine, is not a smooth experience. It is an interruption of something that has become part of how you understand yourself. She has described it as emotionally difficult.
Recovery required rest and structured rehabilitation. Her doctor recommended trying a different racquet sport to rebuild strength in the arm without returning to the specific motion pattern of badminton.
Her father had played squash since 2006. He suggested the court.
One Week to Decide
In the summer of 2016, at around age ten or eleven, Nandini Jain hit her first squash shot.
Her own description of the moment, published in a personal essay: “The sound of the ball hitting the wall was like music to my ears. It was a sound I wanted to hear over and over again.”
After one week of playing squash, she stopped badminton completely. Not gradually. Not as a trial period she was still evaluating. She stopped.
This is not the standard narrative of a career transition. There is usually caution, reluctance, a period of overlapping commitments. Nandini’s switch was immediate and complete. She abandoned state-level badminton, a competitive position she had built over years, for a sport she had been playing for seven days.
Her family supported the decision. Her father’s own familiarity with squash meant she had access to coaching and court time without having to build the infrastructure from scratch.
From First Shot to Asian Junior in Two Years
What followed the switch was fast by any standard.
Within two years of picking up a squash racquet for the first time, Nandini Jain was representing India at the Asian Junior Squash Championship. She did so in 2018 and again in 2019. In 2018 she was approximately twelve years old. In 2019, thirteen.
The Asian Junior Squash Championship is an international team and individual event sanctioned by the Asian Squash Federation, with participating nations from across the continent. Representing India at that level requires selection from a national pool, which means outcompeting every other junior squash player in the country in your age group.
Reaching that level within two years of starting a sport is not typical. It is the kind of rapid acceleration that happens when physical ability, competitive instinct and intrinsic motivation converge. She had the badminton foundation (footwork, racquet awareness, reading a court) but she was applying it to a completely different environment with different physics and different tactical demands.
She also won gold at the School Games Federation of India in both individual and team events, a domestic competition that draws national-level school students across sports.
JEE While Training
Nandini grew up through Delhi’s school system and trained through the period that standard advice in India designates as the “study phase”: Classes 11 and 12, when most families expect athletic commitments to be significantly reduced or stopped.
She did not reduce or stop.
The JEE Advanced examination is widely described as one of the most demanding entrance examinations in the world. It tests conceptual understanding of Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics at a depth that requires genuine command of the material, not surface familiarity. It cannot be passed by memorisation alone. The students who clear it have, typically, spent Class 11 and 12 building a thorough understanding of foundational concepts.
Nandini cleared it while continuing to train and compete in squash.
In a statement published by IIT Madras in January 2025, she described how she managed the academic load: she attends all lectures, and she focuses on understanding the material during class time so she does not have to spend extra hours after training catching up. The compression happens in the classroom, not after.
Her published quote: “I always had a nudge for science and I wanted to do something in the scientific field only. I do not think there is any other college better than IIT Madras to choose. It is the top college that you can get into for Science.”
That is not a statement about going to IIT despite her sport. It is a statement about wanting both, deciding that both were achievable and executing accordingly.
The IIT Madras Sports Excellence Admission
Nandini Jain: Skating to Squash to IIT Madras
IIT Madras Sports Excellence Admission is available to athletes with national/international representation, via merit-adjusted admission.
The programme that Nandini was admitted under is significant in its own right.
IIT Madras was the first IIT in India to introduce undergraduate admissions for sportspersons. The five athletes in the inaugural 2024-25 cohort were not admitted on a lower academic standard. They passed JEE Advanced at the standard required for regular admission and they additionally held national-level competitive records. The Sports Excellence Admission created a formal recognition of athletes who had already qualified. It did not lower what qualifying meant.
The programme is institutional acknowledgement that it is possible to be both, and that institutions which want the best students should create conditions for students who are both.
Nandini chose Computer Science and Engineering. The choice reflects a genuine interest: she has described a drive toward science that predates any consideration of IIT specifically. The degree aligns with both her academic preparation and her longer-term plans.
What Daily Life Looks Like
IIT Madras runs on a demanding academic schedule. Lectures, tutorials, laboratory sessions and assignments fill the standard week in ways that do not accommodate loose time management.
Nandini’s documented approach is structured specifically around this constraint. She trains early, attends every lecture without exception and uses the lecture itself as the primary site of learning, not as a note-taking exercise to be processed later. The goal is to leave each class with the material understood, so that the post-training evening is available for problem sets and assignments rather than revision of concepts she missed during class.
She has noted that her peers in the programme are supportive, and that teaching assistants and professors help when she has questions. The institutional environment, she has indicated, is not hostile to athletes managing dual commitments. The presence of the Sports Excellence Admission programme itself signals that IIT Madras has moved toward accommodation rather than the earlier model of tolerance.
What This Means for Other Athletes
The Nandini Jain story is documented. The programme she entered is documented. The criteria for it are publicly available.
The core assumption that serious sport and serious academics require a choice is wrong. Documented cases prove it. Nandini Jain did not make a choice. She found a pathway to both. She did so by building squash performance to international level while maintaining the academic preparation required for JEE Advanced. When she cleared JEE Advanced, IIT Madras had a programme ready to accommodate exactly that combination.
The programme is new. It will admit more students. The athletic record they need to build and the academic preparation they need to hold are both achievable in parallel, if the work starts early enough and the method is right.
What to Do This Week
Look up the IIT Madras Sports Excellence Admission criteria specifically: what level of national achievement is required, what documentation is needed and what the application timeline is. The programme exists; most athletes and families do not know it does. The IIT Madras admissions website is the authoritative source.
If you are a school-age athlete preparing for competitive entrance examinations: try Nandini's documented in-class strategy for one week. Before every lecture or class, set the goal of leaving with the material understood rather than noted. This is not a study tip. It is a time protection strategy: it keeps the hours after training available for sport and recovery rather than academic catch-up.
If you are a young athlete who has recently experienced an injury that requires stopping your current sport: note that this does not have to be the end of your athletic development. Document what was learned in the sport you are leaving (the physical qualities, the competitive habits, the tactical reading) and consider where those transfer. Nandini's badminton foundation contributed directly to her squash development. The injury changed the sport, not the athlete.