If anyone asks me to name an upcoming Indian tennis player who has the potential to be in the world's Top-100 one of the names that pop into my mind would be Ramkumar Ramanathan. This 18 year old dude is from Chennai and stands taller than 6'3'', and from what I heard he is very disciplined and hardworking.
The Tamil Nadu Tennis Association is sponsoring Ramkumar to train at the Sanchez-Casal Tennis Academy in Spain. With his singles ranking at 703 and his doubles rank standing at 603, many tennis fans like myself are waiting anxiously for this lad to take his game to another level. It is a wonder though about why he is training on clay courts instead of working on his game on the hard or grass courts. Considering the fact that he is tall and could develop a strong serve it would seem he is more suited to play on hard and grass courts.
The evidence is also in the results of his matches. He has been competing in the Spanish clay circuit for the past two years without too much success, but recently he played in a hard court Futures Tournament in Spain and ended up reaching the finals. In the final, Ramkumar fought hard against Steven Diez (world rank: 267), and ended up losing a close match with a score of 5-7, 7-6(4), 4-6.
Regardless of which surface he is training on, lets hope he is getting good instruction from the Sanchez-Casal Tennis Academy. Spain produces the best tennis players in the world (i.e Nadal, Ferrer, Moya and etc.), may be the Spanish secret is to develop players on the clay surface? We will see if that secret holds true for Ramkumar's future success.
I will keep you updated about his progress as time goes on, but remember his name because most likely you will read about him again in the future.
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