‘Very rare for a kid to tell parents, ‘I want to be an athlete”: What India needs for a squash boom

Veer Chotrani (Instagram Photo)

NEW DELHI: Veer Chotrani doesn’t remember learning to love squash, mainly because there was never a version of his life without it. “I’ve been around squash for the last 20 years,” the 24-year-old told TimesofIndia.com during an exclusive interaction. “I was literally born on a squash court, because my father (Manish Chotrani) was a national champion playing for India.”He started proper coaching at four, was entering tournaments by six and seven, and grew into a decorated junior career, which included multiple Asian Junior titles and a run as India’s junior No. 1 across age categories.It’s the kind of story Indian squash needs more of right now, at the exact moment the sport finally has the nation’s attention.Just weeks before, 18-year-old Anahat Singh became the first Indian ever to win the World Junior Squash Championship, beating Egypt’s Ruqayya Salem in the final to end a 16-year run in which no non-Egyptian had won the girls’ title.India’s junior boys followed with a bronze. And on the men’s PSA tour, Chotrani, currently ranked 38th in the world, sits alongside Abhay Singh (24th), Ramit Tandon, and Velavan Senthilkumar as part of a genuinely unusual cluster: four Indian men inside the world’s top 60 simultaneously, for over a year running.

The spark squash needed

Before Anahat, it was the Olympics, Chotrani feels. Squash’s inclusion on the program for Los Angeles 2028 reframed the sport overnight, in India specifically.“Any sport that makes the Olympics for the first time is going to get a lot more publicity, a lot of eyeballs,” he said. “Especially in India, I think the audience here loves champions, in any sport.”Anahat Singh’s World Junior win landed inside exactly that window, giving Indian squash a headline moment tied directly to Olympic hope.“Because squash is an Olympic sport, people have confidence in her getting into the Olympics and doing very well for us,” Chotrani said. “I think the Olympics was the main reason squash became what it is today in the last couple of years, and that we’ve been performing on the world stage.”

The Cornell connection and how it worked

Chotrani’s own path off the junior circuit ran through Cornell University, where he studied psychology and trained under David Palmer, the former world No. 1 who remains his coach today.“The level of squash in the US collegiate circuit is so high that if you break through and do well there, you have everything you need to give it a shot in professional sport,” he said, explaining why three of India’s current top-four men have all used the facilities in the US.Fuelling their determination to work harder is the growing rivalry between the two compatriots. Chotrani and Abhay Singh, India’s current No. 2 and No. 1, played each other three times last season and split the rivalry 2-1 in Chotrani’s favour, including a first-ever meeting in New York, a loss to Abhay in the JSW Open final in Mumbai, and a win at the World Championships in Cairo last May.“It’s always hard to play someone from your own country, especially in the big tournaments,” Chotrani said.What the rivalry does give him, he added, is a target: “It’s great to have someone in front of you that you’re chasing. But I also have to remember I have Ramit and Velavan right behind me. All four of us are the same level on our best day.”

The gaps that still persist

For all the momentum, Chotrani is unsentimental about the structural gap still separating India from squash’s traditional powers, like Egypt.The problem, in his telling, isn’t infrastructure. “We have the courts, we have the facilities,” he said. “What we need is the right guidance and the right people to help not just the players playing right now, but the future generation too.”The clearest evidence being none of India’s top four men actually train inside the country. “Why is that? Because we don’t have the right training partners to make us better. We have to be out of India most of the time.”He contrasts that with Egypt, squash’s dominant nation for decades.“A 10-year-old training in a club in Egypt has one of the best players in the world training in that same club to look up to. They have that inspiration, the best coaches, they have everything there,” he explained.It’s a culture gap as much as a resourcing one, and Chotrani knows it. Government funding has started flowing toward the sport, he agrees, but converting that into an actual home-grown ecosystem, one capable of housing foreign coaches, fitness staff, and sports psychologists under one roof, is the next real project.“None of us would have to go abroad to train. That’s what everybody wants,” he added.

There’s another obstacle that goes beyond funding and training facilities. It is about what an Indian family expects from a kid. “Indian culture is a very academic culture,” Chotrani said with a smile. “Every family wants their kids to have a degree, to pursue medicine or engineering. It’s very rare for a kid to tell their parents, ‘I want to be an athlete.'”

Most junior players in India, he said, follow his own path with strong junior careers, followed by a U.S. degree, after which many simply stop competing. He’s careful not to frame that as a failure of will. “It’s not wrong at all,” he said, pointing to himself, Tandon, and Velavan as proof the two paths aren’t mutually exclusive.What happens next, in Chotrani’s own assessment, depends less on talent and more on whether the country finally builds somewhere for that talent to stay and train.He remarked, “There are people who’ve done everything: played junior squash, gotten a degree from a good school, and are still playing on the professional tour right now. You can do that too.”