Meena Amma – the Cheetah Mom of Indian badminton’s next star Tanvi Sharma, who has assured herself of a World Junior Championships medal at Guwahati

Success has never come easy for Tanvi, and she gritted it out, summoning variety in strokes, before she could down Japanese Matsumoto in the quarters, to ensure a medal.

When she started, Hoshiarpur, bordering Himachal, had a strictly make-do badminton court, with Jalandhar boasting of a proper wooden one. Family finances were often in strife with two careers to juggle. And mother Meena had to learn badminton from scratch.

She meticulously kept notes on training patterns and schedules of Saina Nehwal, Sindhu and even Srikanth and Kashyap when Radhika won a brief spot at the Gopichand academy. And she finally, shifted focus from elder Radhika to younger Tanvi, who was bringing quick results – doing it all by herself, on a single income and bereft of emotional support.

Maybe the mother’s mighty resolve owes precedents to Usharani Nehwal, who once sat with a ramrod straight back at Pune’s Balewadi Sports Complex. Unblinking and vaguely unimpressed by the field, as daughter Saina won India’s first (and till date only) junior world badminton title in 2008, two months after making quarterfinals in seniors at Beijing Olympics.

It had not been uncommon back then for the tall lady with a tight bun and a cheeky glint in her eyes as she gave daggers to sundry opponents of her daughter, to offer sparring practice at a moment’s notice, if nobody else was available. The dupatta would get strapped up – going around shoulder and the waist, like in Kathak practice. Trainers would get laced up, and the big bindi on the forehead would scrunch up as Usharani sent a high serve into the roof lights to start the rally.

The Chinese call them tiger moms – strict, demanding magging women setting ambitions for their children, hovering over training sessions and nudging coaches – ubiquitous with their stilleto clicks in stadia. But Indian badminton tends to have cheetah moms – they get down to the court themselves to spar, slide into trainers, study shuttle trajectories, analyse opponents, plan nutrition charts, learn recovery techniques, and offer the first push to dream big. Training them in speed and deception.

What Usharani was to Saina, Meena would be to Tanvi.

Tanvi had a bit of unfinished business with Guwahati. At 15, she had to forfeit a senior Nationals final against another talented youngster with gun temperament, Anmol Kharb playing in the Assamese capital, due to injury, after leading. But any success the talented strokemaker achieves at home, can be traced back to the dogged determination of her mother, Meena, much before coach Park Tae Sang compared her to Sindhu.

Tanvi had recalled how it all began for her, though Meena had made up her mind that her own aborted career as a national-level volleyball player for Punjab, wouldn’t be her last association with sport, living in Hoshiarpur. Tanvi couldn’t be left back at home while Meena trained Radhika, so she was lugged around and made to run about finding her own amusement. “One day, just for timepass, I snatched my sister’s racquet and insisted my mom teach me to serve,” she recalls.

The focus was on Radhika, but very early in the piece, Tanvi’s wrist skill became apparent. “My drops were better than my sister,” she would say. They were better than almost everyone in her category. Meena never set much store on academics, and the duo’s deeper education was in watching videos of Saina and Sindhu in all the free time they got circa 2013-14.

In the quarters against the Japanese it was the racquet skills as she turned the face of the frame and caught the Japanese with some drops at the net, that showed her talent.

Tanvi began registering title wins immediately, though her training was mostly serving as a tough sparring opponent for her sister. “I would give her a good fight because I could roll my wrist and hit deceptive tosses from the back since pretty early on. We would imagine a court at home even in smallest of spaces, and play shadows of jump smashes,” she recalled.

It’s where Meena’s volleyball muscle memory came in handy. She taught both daughters to jump, and land, with proper technique – the timing of the jump, the racquet positioning, recovering from landing.

2022 proved to be a breakthrough, as Tanvi went on a spree – picking titles at national level in U15, U17 and U19, and going right up to the seniors final. “My focus was only on winning my category, U15. But in U17 I ended up defeating Anmol, U19 Shriyanshi (Valishetty), and in seniors, reached finals beating Tanya Hemanth, Unnati Hooda in third round which I didn’t expect, Aakarshi Kashyap and then Isharani Baruah,” Tanvi reeled off names of her scalps speaking a few months back. This was virtually the entire cohort of next generation shuttlers in women’s singles.

In the finals against Anmol, Tanvi won the opener, and was leading in the second when she snapped her hamstring. “I had to suddenly leave. I felt very, very bad. For three months due to injury I felt very down that I had missed an opportunity.” Anmol would go on to take India to Asian team gold playing decisive singles, and had been a worthy national champ.

But for Tanvi, it was a dark phase. “At that age, I was just standing in one place and not moving on court and there was no maturity that injuries do heal!” she recalls the setback. Hoshiarpur had felt remote and even when she returned from Hyderabad due to financial worries, it had taken her a while to come to terns with it all. It’s when her mother, armed with knowledge of Sindhu and Saina’s training drills and Gopichand’s basic coaching blueprint, set about resurrecting her spirits.

Meena’s training wasn’t exactly backed by years of knowledge, but she knew to systematically follow plans, and work long hours. Last November she would move to the national juniors camp at Guwahati. The net needed massive improvements, and at the US Open she would defeat a Top 25 to make finals, at the Asian juniors, she would go down to a Chinese in semis to win India a medal after 13 years.

Sensing how overwhelmed she was, Meena had told her later it had just been fear of the Chinese. “Most players are just OK, its just that we are physically weaker and mentally need to be strong,” she had said back in July. Tanvi would make good the promise of playing fearlessly and shrug off the setback against the Japanese to nail the medal.

“Everything good in badminton for me is because of sacrifices made by my mother and sister. I’ll never forget what they’ve done for me,” she had said.

The Cheetah cub was ready to leap, and get that elusive medal for women’s singles.