The Rising Stars of Indian Tennis Taking the ATP Challenger Tour by Storm!
Several Indian male tennis players play on the ATP Challenger Tour. Some of them have participated in ATP tour events before poor results have caused them to lose ranking points and fall in the rankings. Others have performed well in ITF World Tennis Tour (also known as Futures) events and gained a high enough ranking to play challengers.
Ramkumar Ramanathan
Ramkumar Ramanathan is a right-handed singles and doubles player. During his singles career, he has beaten Dominic Thiem, reached the final of the Hall of Fame Tennis Championships and taken part in seven Challenger finals including the final of the 2021 Bahrain Ministry of Interior Tennis Challenger, which he won against Evgeny Karlovskiy.
Embed from Getty ImagesIn doubles, he has won the Adelaide International and Maharashtra Open, multiple challengers and was a silver medallist in the men’s doubles tournament at the Asian Games last September with Saketh Myneni.
Mukund Sasikumar
Mukund Sasikumar is a singles player who participates in challengers and Futures tournaments.
Embed from Getty ImagesHe has previously entered ATP events but has never made it past the first round. Sasikumar has won six Futures tournaments and lost two ATP Challenger Tour finals in China in 2019 and Italy in 2022.
N Sriram Balaji
N Sriram Balaji played doubles and singles earlier in his career, with his best ranking being 287. In doubles, he has competed in Grand Slams and ATP tournaments and regularly plays challengers. Balaji and Jeevan Nedunchezhiyan were partners between 2022 and August 2023 and have since gone their separate ways.
Embed from Getty ImagesBalaji has played with Andre Begemann, while Nedunchezhiyan played with Arjun Kadhe before entering the Macedonian Open and Vicenza Challenger with N Vijay Sundar Prashanth.
N Vijay Sundar Prashanth
N Vijay Sundar Prashanth is a doubles player who, like N Sriram Balaji, also had some success in singles. Eight of the ten singles finals he reached in the Futures category took place in India, two of which were played in his hometown, Chennai. Sundar Prashanth won twenty Futures tournaments in doubles before focussing on playing challengers. He has previously participated in challengers with Anirudh Chandrasekar, a former singles player he has also played Futures events with.
Embed from Getty ImagesNiki Kaliyanda Poonacha
Niki Kaliyanda Poonacha has recently decided to concentrate on playing doubles after being a singles player for most of his career. Kaliyanda Poonacha and Rithvik Choudary Bollipalli won 6 Futures titles in a row in doubles and played their first Challenger tournament together in March 2023. During the second half of last season, they played with different partners (Niki with Adam Taylor and Divij Sharan and Rithvik with Arjun Kadhe), although they played together at the start of this season and recently won two Challenger titles in Mexico.
Embed from Getty ImagesNiki sometimes enters singles qualifying for Challengers and has been given wildcards for Challenger tournaments in India. He reached the quarter-finals of the Pune Challenger in February.
Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash