Deccan Herald » Sports » Detailed Story

14 KSLTA wards to train in Spain

DH News Service Bangalore:

The Karnataka State Lawn Tennis Association’s High Performance Training Centre shifts base to Barcelona next week, where they will hire six courts for six hours a day at the Mollet Club for an intensive training and tournament regimen for the next two months.

Fourteen players -- the youngest only ten -- along with coaches Jonathan Subbs and M Balachandran, fitness trainer Christian Bosse and physio Satya, will leave Bangalore late on Monday. Most of the trainees in the academy are from the state. There are others from Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra -- two of the strongest tennis states in the country.

The players mostly make up two categories -- the tournament players and the ones looking for early matchplay experience. Only Kaushik Raju, 17, will be looking at men’s tournaments. He’ll travel to France, Portugal and Italy to play Futures tournaments.

Karnataka State Lawn Tennis Association secretary Sunder Raju said that his association was funding some of the players. “Some of them are being funded on merit while some are being helped out because they are falling short of funds,” he added.

Raju explained that the popularity of the scheme, once a target of criticism, was that its the first of its kind in the country, where an association has offered parents of tennis players coaching, fitness training, tournament travel and education under a single wing.

“They have a professional set up they can trust. For our part, from hundreds of the children that will go through our hands we are hoping that we will find at least one raw talent that we can cut into a sparkling diamond.”