Young Manas dreams big after Asian title

It’s been a gruelling couple of weeks for Manas Dhamne, leaving the 14-year-old exhausted yet exhilarated. On Saturday, he led Maharashtra to the men’s tennis team title at the National Games in Ahmedabad, warding off two match points in his final singles tie. There was a bigger reason to cheer for the Pune boy last weekend in his home city.

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Manas won the ITF Asia/Oceania Juniors Championship, becoming the youngest Indian to win the tournament and jumping 105 places in the ITF junior rankings. At 82nd, the teen is now the country's top-ranked junior boy, more than two years younger to the next best. The 300 points that Manas pocketed from the Asian event held at home also earned him a spot in next year’s Australian Open juniors, where he will make his maiden junior Grand Slam appearance.

Manas has been touted as a promising junior since the time he won the under-12 singles title at the Eddie Herr Championship—one of the most prestigious junior tennis events in the world—in 2019. That promise has only picked pace this season. In January, Manas won an ITF J2—the second highest tournament category—in Chandigarh coming through the qualifying draw for his maiden title only a year into plying on the ITF junior circuit. In May, he got the first taste of the pro level at an ATP Challenger qualifier in Italy before the Pune Asian Grade B1 title to break into the top-100 junior rankings after finishing last year on 695.

“It’s been a very good season so far, playing a lot of matches, winning tournaments and continuously improving,” Manas said. “It’s been a big developmental phase, tennis-wise. Good signs for next year and the Slams.”

A vital cog in that steadily-churning developmental wheel has been the physical gains. That is majorly down to Manas checking into the Piatti Tennis Centre in Bordighera, Italy last April. After the Eddie Herr title, IMG referred the Indian for a training gig at the centre run by Riccardo Piatti, the renowned Italian coach who has had stints with numerous top 10 stars and till recently coached world No 10 Jannik Sinner.

When not competing in tournaments, Manas spends months at the academy and believes the marked differentiator over the last few months has been his body strength. “Tennis-wise, you will always keep improving. This is the right age to build your body and develop your fitness,” he said. “I’m getting physically stronger. And I can feel it in my matches and the way I run on the court. The last two days (in Ahmedabad) I played three-hour matches, and I could feel my increased stamina.”

His father, Manoj Dhamne, too singles out that aspect in Manas’s progress chart from training in Europe to India. Tennis, he reckons, was a natural fit for his son ever since he glanced through kids playing the game on a scooter ride with his father in Pune and instantly got attracted. Four-and-a-half then, a coach at a local academy insisted he couldn’t take him until he was five. “I had forgotten about it, but he did not. On his 5th birthday, Manas cried a lot, saying he wanted to start playing tennis,” Dhamne said.

Enrolled in the Solaris Academy in Pune, Manas won his first title—an under-8 tournament in the city—within a year of first holding the racquet.

Years on, the kid has progressed to having hitting sessions with the likes of Sinner and Karolina Pliskova, the former world No 1 Czech, at the Piatti Centre. The coy kid doesn’t talk too much with them but takes a deep dive into their training methods. “I observe how they practice, talk, and warm up before a session. Just having a hit with them is an experience in itself in terms of the speed and level,” Manas said.

Manas understands the challenges of that step up in level. Indeed, his straight-sets qualifying loss in the ATP Challenger this year showed him that; “like the importance of a stronger serve to win free points”, he said. The teen though is ready to shift focus towards that from next season, where he intends to play more on the men’s circuit. “The more I play at that level, the more I will improve and be able to perform at that level,” he said. “It’s a long road. My long-term goal is to win Grand Slams.”

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