“Sumit always had this burning desire” - Bobby Mahal, Sumit Nagal’s Childhood Coach

Bobby Mahal, Sumit Nagal’s childhood coach, shares incredible stories from Nagal’s development years, offering a unique insight into the making of a tennis star. From the early days of their first encounter in 2008 to the challenges and triumphs of training him in Toronto as a 12-year-old, Mahal provides a vivid account of Sumit’s journey.

He delves into Nagal’s life on the ITF Junior Tour, highlighting the key moments and strategic decisions that shaped his career. Mahal’s reflections shed light on the relentless dedication, resilience, and talent that propelled Sumit Nagal from Jhajjar, India, to the world stage.

EXCERPTS:

Tolasaria – When and how did you first meet Sumit? What were your first impressions of him?

Mahal – In the summer of 2008, I met with Mahesh (Bhupathi) to iron out the details of his program called the Foundation of Indian Sporting Talent (FIST), powered by Apollo Tyres. We had trials around the country to select young kids for the program, which is where Sumit was first selected. But I couldn’t be a part of those trials because of a visa delay. I reached Bangalore in September 2008 to join as the Director of Coaching for the program, and by then a pool of 20 kids had already been selected. There were four boys who were 12 and under, and one of the kids happened to be Sumit, who had just turned 11. That was my first introduction with Sumit.

Selected kids from the Apollo Tyres program (Sumit Nagal red sleeveless in front row)

One interesting story is – when I got there, Mahesh told me to check out all the 20 kids one by one and tell him what I thought. I came up with an idea and told Mahesh that I wanted to see these kids compete with the best kids in the world in their age groups, and not just amongst in domestic tournaments. So we went to Florida with the top 12 kids for the Eddie Herr International and Orange Bowl Championships.

During one of our first training sessions there, we had matched our best 12 year old (Sumit) and 14 year old (Rohan Bhatia) to play against top 12 and 14 year olds from other countries. Sumit played and beat a top German 12 year old, while Rohan twisted his ankle in the first game of the match against the other 14 year old and couldn’t continue. Then Sumit got up and said he wanted to step in. To which I said that the other boy was two years older than him and was much stronger. I wasn’t sure if the other coach would go for it, but he did. Sumit ended up giving the boy a really competitive set, taking him to 7-6.

11 year old Sumit Nagal with Bobby Mahal in Florida in 2008

I remember that night I messaged Mahesh saying “I’m really impressed with this Nagal kid”. That’s when it kind of hit me in the fall of 2008 that this kid is a keeper. We really need to keep an eye on him and keep working on him, because he already has great fitness levels – speed, athleticism, and just the natural ability to compete. Later on in that tour at the Orange Bowl, he made the third round and ended up losing to Andrey Rublev in 3 sets. They were both very young, and you couldn’t tell who’s going to be who. But Sumit was always very competitive with the top kids his age from around the world at a young age.

Tolasaria – Sumit also had a single handed backhand for some time. When did the switch to a two handed backhand happen?

Mahal – Actually he started his tennis with a two handed backhand before I had started working with him. But he really struggled getting acceleration from the left side and it was more right hand dominant. Usually, two handed backhand players have a really strong left arm as well and can hit left hand forehands pretty well. Sumit didn’t particularly have a very strong left side. Three months into the program in November 2008, we experimented with a one handed backhand. But we realized that this solution would not be long term, so we decided to move back to a double handed backhand in April 2011 after a couple of years of trying. We realized then that the game was becoming more baseline based with longer rallies and less net play. And looking back you can see there is a decreasing number of players in the top 100 with a one handed backhand. So I think we made the right choice.

Tolasaria – Can you talk about the time when he moved to Toronto? It must not have been easy as a 12 year old to leave home and move to another country?

Mahal – In the summer of 2010, I got a call from Mahesh saying that our sponsor Apollo Tyres was pulling out of the program due to the global economic recession. So we were left scrambling. That summer, Reliance had announced that they were going to handpick some tennis players from India and move them to the IMG Academy in Florida. So a lot of the kids from our program had gone to the Reliance-IMG trials. They were going to fly a group of selected kids from India to Florida to conduct further evaluation.

Sumit was one of the kids selected to go to Florida. Nick Bollettieri was going to do the final selection to personally make the final calls. After the trials, there were five kids that were selected – Nandini Das, Shweta Sangwan, Ronit Bisht, Ojasvinee Singh and Basil Khuma. Sumit was amongst those that weren’t selected. So he ended up coming back to Bangalore and train with a few more kids. We were coming to a time when we were running out of funds around July 2010. So with Mahesh we were discussing what to do. Then I came up with the idea of taking a couple of the kids to Canada until the (sponsorship) situation clears up. Mahesh said it was fine.

So we chose Abhimanyu Vannemreddy (a very talented 10 year old) and Sumit (then 13) to come to Canada. But unfortunately Abhimanyu was denied a visa to come to Canada because of his age. So that left Sumit as the only one. Then our full-time coach/player association continued from there. About four weeks later, Mahesh called me saying the sponsorship situation was not improving fast enough, and asked me to keep Sumit in Canada itself and have him compete in the Canadian junior tournaments.

I had connections in Canada having lived here for so many years. So we were training at the national center in Toronto. Sumit was practicing a lot with the likes of Bianca (Andreescu), Denis (Shapovalov), Alejandro (Tabilo) etc. Even though Sumit was not Canadian, the federation was nice enough to let me bring him in and train with the other Canadian players. We had all the resources there, so we decided it was best for him to be based in Toronto. So for 4 years, it was my full time job to be with Sumit and take care of his training and all.

Mahal and Nagal in 2010; Nagal’s 1st week in Toronto

Mahal training a young Nagal in Toronto

Tolasaria – What was your strategy for him in those years?

Mahal – I was very clear early on that I wanted him to play against the best juniors his age from around the world. So we were not going to tournaments where he would necessarily be winning the whole thing, but I just wanted him to be in a very competitive environment and develop good habits. I remember we went to South America, Central America then to Europe. I obviously knew from the start that clay was a very strong surface for him, although he had some good results on hard as well. But with his playing style and the heavy topspin forehand and his natural ability to slide, clay really suited his game. So I tried to configure more of a clay court schedule for him.

And as the results started coming in 2011, he started doing better and better in ITF Juniors. One of the things we did early on in 2011 was we wanted him to get to be on the Junior Davis Cup team and represent India. He was quite lowly ranked in India at that time around 8th or 9th in U14 and U16 at the end of 2010. So in January 2011, we went to India to play a group of tournaments – National Series, Super Series, etc. We wanted him to do well in those and get into the Top 3 in India and make the Junior Davis Cup team. It could be a leverage in terms of separating himself and being able to potentially attract sponsors. He ended up winning all three U14’s and two of the U16’s, becoming No.2 in India. He then went to Europe to play for India in the U14 Junior Davis Cup where they reached Quarter-finals and he had some solid wins in the process.

Sumit Nagal right up there

Tolasaria – As a junior, Sumit had several great wins over the likes of Berrettini, Shapovalov, Mmoh, etc. Do you have any specific memories from those matches?

Mahal – A lot of matches stand out. I still vividly remember him playing a 3.5 hour match against Andrey Rublev in U12 Orange Bowl. For me, an Indian playing 40-ball rallies with Europeans was unheard of. So that was the first big moment for me to see his potential. As a 13 or 14 year old, he was really pushing Canadian Davis Cup players in practice sets as well, going to 7-5 or 7-6 or splitting sets against the likes of (Daniel) Nestor, (Peter) Polansky, (Frank) Dancevic, etc.

Against Shapovalov and Berrettini, Sumit was actually the favorite going into those matches. So you look back in time and think that it’s pretty amazing. But it wasn’t so surprising at the time. Michael Mmoh at the 2015 Junior Australian Open was probably his first big win at a Grand Slam since Mmoh was a high seed. Another match that stands out is Sumit beating Tommy Paul at an ITF in Mexico quite easily in straight sets. Tommy had just won the Orange Bowl just a few months ago beating Sumit in the semi-final, and Sumit got revenge a few months later. He also beat Frances Tiafoe in Maryland in three sets. He also lost in three sets against Cam Norrie.

But for me, it was always more about being hyper competitive against these guys, than about winning or losing. They are all still so young and are developing and you need to think long term. Mahesh told me early on that Indian players take time to peak and often develop a little later than players from other countries. He was actually right now that I look back at it as Sumit broke the top 100 at 26 years old.

Sumit always had that thing about him. There used to always be that one shot or point in a practice or match that would make you do a double take and go like “Did he just make that shot?”. His retrieving skills from a very young age were very high, he felt there was no ball he couldn’t get. But we worked a lot on his offensive game over the years, particularly developing his forehand, because we couldn’t expect him to play just defensive tennis and win all the time.

Another match that stands out is when we were in Florida for the Eddie Herr Championships when he was 16, we decided to play one ITF Men’s $15k Futures highly competitive Pre-Qualifying, then Qualifying event. He actually beat a young Miomir Kecmanovic, an unknown IMG kid at that time and ended up qualifying for the main draw. He then played a guy who was as high as 250 in the ATP Rankings at one point. Sumit had no ATP Ranking obviously. He ended up upsetting that guy to get his first ATP point. That was a big moment as well, because he had to play 8 matches just to get into the main draw, and then he wins his first main draw match, beating a much older and high ranked player. Wow!

Sumit Nagal’s first ATP point, at the IMG Academy of all places, the place that rejected him

14yo Sumit Nagal hitting with Canadian Davis Cup player Peter Polansky

Tolasaria – We’ve talked a lot about how his tennis was. But how was he as a kid outside the tennis court?

Mahal – Sumit grew a lot as a person during his time in Toronto. He was a pretty shy kid to start, and you could see he wasn’t very confident with his English skills. He then started improving those big time, particularly from being in Canada. He was very social and had a very unique personality. He asked a lot of questions – not just about tennis, but also life. How things worked – finance, politics, investments, etc. Traveling was also a big education process for him. He had never been outside India until 2008, so It was really an eye opener for him. We did as much as we could to educate him about nutrition, health and well-being.

He picked up things really fast. Sumit was one of the most liked guys on the Junior Tour. He always attracted a lot of attention and people wanted to hang out with him since he was 13-14. For us, it was just trying to expose him to life and how to take responsibility. That window was very important for him to grow from a young boy to a young adult.

Tolasaria – Lastly, how do you feel seeing Sumit where he is right now?

Mahal – We had to get it right with Sumit. Because we had just one chance. For instance, Nick Bollettieri had 200 kids at IMG and the 5 from India, so even if one of them failed, he had many more chances for someone to breakthrough. There was a lot of trust involved. Sumit’s parents trusting Mahesh, sponsors trusting Mahesh, Mahesh trusting me with Sumit, then sending him to Europe as a 17 year old where he’s now based – it was a coordinated effort by a number of people to get a player like him to that level. They say it takes a village to raise a child, and it indeed took a lot of people to be on board to make him one of the highest ranked ATP players from India of all time, and hopefully he can stay there for many more years to come. It’s been incredibly rewarding for all involved to see him break through. The ironic thing is a few years later after he didn’t make the IMG-Reliance cut, and once Sumit started producing international results, IMG contacted Sumit offering a scholarship. But by then we knew he was on the right path and what we were doing was working.

He was a kid from Jhajjar, India, who did not have the best shoes or newest clothes or proper tennis equipment to play. But I think that built a lot of character in him. He had to earn everything, he had to separate himself from others. There were 20 kids in the program when I started and some were already top 50 ITF Juniors and so on, and we could have selected any other one of them to bring to Toronto, but the reason we picked him was because he had this burning desire to separate himself – something that’s more than just a forehand or a backhand; something that can’t really be taught.