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Writer's pictureBijoy Daga

Management Lessons from my Sport

Updated: Jul 20, 2023

Team Turiya just returned from the 3rd Indian Open Pickleball Championship held in Jaipur (Jan 10-12, 2020) with some impressive performances in the 40+ category. Singles Gold, Mixed Doubles Silver and Doubles Bronze. Lot of learnings from this event which we thought are relevant and can be incorporated in interesting ways in Corporate Management.



If you are wondering what Pickleball is, here is a background. Having had trysts with injuries during my 7-8 years participating in Mumbai Marathon, I was looking for something as intense but injury free. In this process, I discovered Pickleball, a simple racket sport, much like tennis and yet very different. It combines many elements of tennis, badminton and table tennis. Those interested in learning more about this sport can see https://www.usapa.org/what-is-pickleball/ . If you want to watch highlights of a few interesting games please have a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLphJpbwA2A. And if you want to get introduced to the sport, feel free to get in touch with me on linked-in.


There is a Manager and a Sportsman in each of us, so to use these terms like two players in opposite side of the tennis court can be confusing. It seems like the old narrative in Bollywood – poor+hardworking vs rich+careless. Yet we have to do it at times in this article since that’s what the context requires. 


We have been playing Pickleball for a little over 3 years now, playing passionately, practicing hard occasionally, showing sparks of brilliance but losing consistently in tournaments. The Jan 2020 championship was a redemption of sorts and reaffirmed something that we always knew but seldom practiced, i.e. Do the right things and you will get the right results.


I have, for a very long time, been trying to pin-point the few reasons why so many individuals in India are such super brains but perform significantly below their potential in the corporate world and in several other activities that require working collectively. In my experience, one of the reasons is lack of sports in our everyday lives. So our children miss any exposure to qualities and attributes like teamwork, focus, strategic thinking, fitness, sportsman spirit, fighting adversities, bouncing back from the dead etc. All these can be inculcated through sports but unfortunately, we are largely interested in academics only. Some of us who have worked in large organisations will testify that the bonhomie in the team increases multifold whenever your HR colleague organizes a team sports event in the company. Sadly, your budgets have always been constrained since your workaholic CEO may have been the unfortunate hardworking Indian kid who has grown up without sports in his or her life.


Now as I get deeper into the world of sports over the last 3 years with this new sport of mine, I have another perspective. Sports associations and organisations in our country actually require a lot of guidance, management skills and vision in order to achieve their objectives. We in the corporate world in India have not given enough in this area. Simply giving the associations money (for meeting our CSR budgets) is not enough. So the problem is circular. No management in sports and its administration and hence the lack of sportsman spirit in management in the corporate world. This point will require another article which we will write later with assistance from people in the sports fraternity and CXOs.


Coming back to the tournament and what we learnt from it.


The sports circuit has been giving me new friends and one of them is Atul Edward, a proven performer and a winner across all formats of the game for several years. My first interaction with him was when I played against him in a tournament in Oct 2017 for a singles match at the semi-final stage. My fitness levels and athleticism at that point were at the peak and the full energy was on display when I was diving 6 ft to reach the ball. The fellow players who were the spectators, were delighted to see a 45 year old man wannabe Boris Becker. After losing the match, I asked Atul what went wrong. He wasn’t my friend then but mentioned in the passing “Why were you unnecessarily diving and wasting your energy”. That was an interesting and powerful observation. Management Lesson 1 : Don’t waste management resources


Learning from that experience, I stopped diving for the ball, but the losing streak was continuing. We were really good on the court in our backyard but the performance level in the tournaments was not really upto the mark. By now leading sportsmen in this sport had become our good friends and started giving us advise. After a dismal performance in the Dec 2019 tournament in Pune, we went back to Atul for advise. His observation was “You guys are playing without a purpose”. He could even hear the sound of dead spots in my paddle (that’s what the racket used in Pickleball is called) and immediately gave me a new paddle. Management Lesson No 2 : Work with a purpose. If you work with a purpose, you will set a lot of things right, right from equipment selection, technique and training.


So we were now a little more learned. By this time Deepali was clear and hell bent on erasing the memory of our poor performance in the Pune event. For the first time in 2 years, we paused “playing for fun” and started “training for the tournament”. What followed was drills, skill improvement, serving deep, returning deep, facing smashes, team coordination etc. We created simulations like coming back from matchpoint down, developing winning frames in our mind, covering deficits. Management Lessons 3 : Focussed and targeted Training helps. We hope to elaborate this point in a future article from my HR practitioner partner that will deal with the state of corporate training in India as it stands now.


Match day learnings……..multiple management lessons 


1.      Never form any opinions about the players by looking at them. Some of them look beatable but aren’t. There are new players and new talent at every event. Don’t prepare so hard for specific players that you lose sight of the possibility of new competition. 

2.      Past reputations and past track records do not matter on the match day. An average player may be having a good day and a good player a bad day. An average player may have upgraded his or her skill since you last saw them.

3.      You come across a left-handed player occasionally. Before you realise anything you can end up losing half the points feeding into the forehand of the player thinking that you are hitting his backhand. This happened to me in the SF of Oct 2017 tournament in the match with Atul. In the Indian open 2020, it was a feeling of deja-vu with another strong left-handed player in the semi-finals. Fortunately, I did not repeat the old mistake.  

4.      No doubt you can come back from match point down. But for that you really need luck on your side in addition to your concentration. What will happen if two consecutive balls hit the net and come in (this happened to us in the finals of our mixed doubles match when we did not get the opportunity to come back from dead despite having practiced for it). Therefore, it is better to play safe and never reach that stage deliberately or due to carelessness. Keep margin for error. Don’t reach the dead-end for making a comeback.

5.      Believe in your partner and let him or her play. Poaching (a PB term where the doubles player covers the shots directed at his or her partner) can be helpful at times but not at all times. I realized in our losing doubles games that it would have been better to have trusted my partners and lose the game, rather than trying to poach, make mistakes and lose the game anyway.

6.      In the real tournament it is not always about the technique, there is an X factor. You will win regular games only by technique but when the skillsets of competitors are even or when the chips are down there is an X factor that comes in. The X-factor will not remain X if we are able to define or articulate it. Isn’t it nice that some things cannot be analysed, coded and copied?

7.      Get a strategy team on the crucial day to work at the backend – the players performing on the court can’t sit back and see things since they have a narrower vision of the real proceedings and are dealing with performance anxiety anyway. In all my league stage singles matches on day 1, I had my doubles partner Mohan acting as the strategist for my games. On the day 3, when Mohan went back to Mumbai, an unknown fellow participant, Dr Amar appeared from nowhere and filled up that space for my most important semi-finals singles game. In the Singles finals, mixed doubles partner Deepali filled that gap. If it wasn’t for them, I would have squandered my winning positions multiple times.

Singles Finals, our main event, was a 3 setter. Overconfident due to (1) my super SF match win against an established player and (2) a win against my finalist opponent at the league stage, I created a losing position for myself and was 6-10, set point down.

This was the kind of moment for which we had a simulated a special drill in our training sessions with my practice partner Santosh. We call it “Lock Lagao”. This entails that you think in your mind that you have locked the score of your opponent – that’s it. So, I locked the opponents score at 10 and had a rally of 16 points after that, winning the 1st set 12-10 and going all the way up to the match point (10-0) in set no 2. At this point there was a time-out called by my opponent. A slight lapse of concentration and my desire to attempt one dive for the gallery took over. It was a relatively risk-free moment in the match and I went for the heroics, losing 3 points in the process. Had I lost the match at this stage (10-4), we would have learnt another management lesson – “not to be foolish”. Fortunately, things turned out to be fine – both the dive and the result, i.e Singles Gold.


- Author -

Bijoy Daga


The article was published on writer's Linkedin page on January 19th 2020


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