Sunder Iyer speaks on localizing international guidelines for restart of tennis in India

Tennis administrator, Sunder Iyer has said that restarting Tennis at a local level as traveling is going to be tough.

Speaking in an interview with Coach Balachandran Manikkath, Iyer revealed that the governing body is taking steps in the country in restarting tennis.

One of the moves made by the Indian Olympic Association (IOC), according to him, was that they sent a questionnaire to all the Sports Federations in the country last week Thursday.

Iyer, who is also an Administrator in Maharashtra, also disclosed that the body had gone the questionnaire through the Maharashtra Olympic Association since the IOC had sent them to the State Federations as well.

As the federation starts looking at how Tennis in the country can resume after the COVID-19 pandemic, the questionnaire had questions around the Government guidelines.

He revealed that there are questions like the sport being a contact sport and how social distancing will be taken care of amongst other things.

On the will to restarting, the sport administrator said the onus now lies with the state and the local administration, and this will also apply to the district level.

On what MSLTA has been doing in preparing for the resumption of the sport in the district, he said the district associations had discussed, and they had charted down what is needed to be done.

While noting that the ITF had already released a guideline regarding the start of tennis, he said there are USTA guidelines too, and MSLTA is going to make use of the best from the guidelines and localise them as they are international. Being international, he noted that they couldn’t conform to the current local situation.

As part of the guideline, Iyer said what obtains at the moment is that the crowds and the parents have to be away from the tourneys, and they also need to restrict the draw size.

According to him, they also need to provide a lot of sanitizers and keep the coaches healthy too.

This will no doubt makes the costs of the tourneys to rise.

Written by: Oladipupo Mojeed