The empty pockets game: How Velavan Senthilkumar is betting on a sport that barely pays

Velavan Senthilkumar closes out Balázs Farkas 11-4, 11-2, 11-3 in front of the Hungarian’s own home crowd, and there is a small, tired smile, not a scream, not a fist pump that lasts ten seconds. He has done this before. Ten times before, actually. This is title number 11.

But this one is different. It is his first Copper-level crown, the first time he has beaten a top seed ranked inside the world’s top 20 on his way to a final, and it comes with a prize pool of just $43,500 split across the entire draw. Not per player. For everyone.

Sit with that number for a second, because everything in this story flows from it.

A tennis kid who ran indoors because of the rain

Senthilkumar did not start out chasing glass courts. He started with a tennis racquet at age six, growing up in Chennai in a household that took sport seriously without being obsessive about it.

His mother, Shanmukham Priyadharshini, played badminton at the national level. His father, Ramasamy Senthilkumar, played basketball nationally before settling into the family’s garment manufacturing business.

Then the monsoon happened. Around sixth grade, Chennai’s rains kept washing out his tennis sessions, week after week. A neighbour named Karan Rathore played squash at the local courts, and that is really how it began. Not some grand plan, just a kid looking for somewhere dry to hit a ball.

He took to it fast. “I felt like squash is more interesting in terms of different angles,” he would say later to The Bridge. “We have all the angles we can play in the sport.” That is a coach’s answer wrapped in a kid’s honesty.

By 2016 he was Asian Junior champion. In 2017, he won the British Junior Open Under-19 title, beating fellow Indian Abhay Singh in a tight four-setter, becoming only the third Indian ever to win it. American college coaches noticed. Columbia University came calling.

The major that was really about scheduling

Here is where the business of being an athlete quietly enters the picture, long before any prize money does.

At Columbia, Senthilkumar became the Lions’ number 1 player, won unanimous First Team All-Ivy honours in 2018 and 2019, and led the team to an Ivy League Championship with First Team All-American recognition in 2018. Good enough, on paper.

But midway through, he switched his major from statistics to psychology. Not out of academic passion. Out of pure logistics. Statistics classes clashed with training blocks and travel windows. Psychology gave him flexibility to still compete internationally while finishing a degree at one of America’s most demanding universities.

“A balance between academics and squash was very new and tough for me,” he admitted. “There were different time slots where I could train. Managing academics and squash was pretty hard during university.”

That single decision, invisible to fans, tells you everything about how a pro squash career actually gets built. It is not built on talent alone. It is built on constant small trade-offs, most of them financial or logistical, made years before anyone is watching.

Graduating into nothing

He left Columbia in 2022 and walked straight into a ranking outside the world’s top 200. No club contract waiting. No signing bonus. Just a plane ticket and a calendar full of tournaments he would have to pay to enter. This is where the sport’s real economics start to bite.

Compare squash to tennis for a moment, because the gap is almost embarrassing. The ATP Tour reportedly distributes over 180 million dollars a year in prize money. The PSA Tour, squash’s top circuit, distributed roughly $8.95 million across the entire 2022-23 season. One sport’s annual global pot is smaller than what a single ATP Masters event might hand out in a week.

Ranked 100 in tennis, a player can pocket over $200,000 a year in prize money alone. Ranked similarly in squash, earnings sit somewhere between $20,000 and $35,000, and that is before expenses eat into it.

And the expenses are brutal. According to this report, a touring squash pro spends somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 a year just to stay on tour, flights eating up 40 to 45 percent of that, hotels and food another quarter, coaching and academy fees taking a further chunk, and physiotherapy, restringing and visa fees mopping up whatever is left.

At a small Challenger event with a total purse of $10,000 to $20,000, even reaching the semi-final might earn a player around $1,500, an amount a single bad flight connection can wipe out entirely. Lose in the first round of a bigger event and the cheque can be under $500.

There is no pension plan waiting at the end either. Tennis has one. Squash, currently, has none.

“Expect your pockets to be empty”

Nobody says this better than Abhay Singh, the same player Senthilkumar beat in that 2017 junior final and who has remained his teammate and rival ever since.

Singh is blunt about it. “Choose squash only if you truly love the sport, not for money or anything else,” he has said in this interview to Sportskeeda. “There’s no significant money to be made here. You’ll need to start with full pockets and expect them to be empty by the time you’re done.”

He is not exaggerating for effect. Early in his career, his mother travelled with him just to manage the logistics of being on tour alone in a foreign country. His father funded his travel out of pocket for years before any government support arrived. Singh has described the loneliness of it too, months spent training in England, “eating all three meals alone,” as he put it, his social life “non-existent.”

In December 2021, after missing out on national squad selection, Singh actually considered quitting altogether. He did not.
He got picked for the 2022 Commonwealth Games squad, won his first Challenger title in Lorient, France, and then, at the 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou, saved match points at 8-10 in the fifth game against Pakistan’s Noor Zaman to win gold for India, 11-7, 9-11, 8-11, 11-9, 12-10.

His father, who had relocated from Uttar Pradesh to Chennai just to be near the Indian Squash Academy, watched from work and broke down crying on the phone afterward. His mother, who has a heart condition, could not bear to watch it live.
That is what this sport asks of families. Not just money. Nerves too.

Where the money is finally starting to show up

Now here is the part that changes the tone of this story a little.

Squash is entering the Olympics for the first time at Los Angeles 2028, and that single fact is rewriting the sport’s financial map faster than anything else has in years.

In May 2024, the Indian government added Senthilkumar, Abhay Singh and Anahat Singh to the Target Olympic Podium Scheme, known as TOPS, which now funds international training, coaching, equipment and travel to key qualifying events.

That is real money, government money, aimed specifically at athletes who were previously funding all of this themselves. Corporate India has moved too. HCL’s partnership with the Squash Rackets Federation of India, running since 2016, has expanded into the HCL India Squash Tour, now spread across 6 Indian cities for the 2025-26 season, with events ranging from a $15,000 Challenger in Chennai down to $6,000 events in Delhi, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad.

Equal prize money for men and women, which is not something every sport manages to say honestly.

Then there is the JSW Indian Open, a $40,000 PSA Copper event at Mumbai’s Bombay Gymkhana, which brought top-level international squash back to Indian soil after a 7-year gap. Players like Ramit Tandon, Senthilkumar and Anahat Singh now get a shot at ranking points without burning through a plane ticket budget to earn them.

Why does any of this matter to a sponsor’s balance sheet? Because Olympic inclusion turns an athlete into a broadcast asset. A gold medal at the 2026 Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya will earn direct qualification to LA 2028, and that pathway is exactly the kind of narrative corporate sponsors can point a camera at.

The court itself costs a fortune too

It is worth pausing on why squash struggles to spread in India the way badminton has. A badminton court needs a synthetic mat, costing roughly Rs 4 to 10 lakh to build.

A squash court needs sprung hardwood flooring and specialised walls, and even a basic plastered version costs Rs 18 to 25 lakh. A glass-back court for serious competition runs Rs 25 to 35 lakh. The portable, four-sided glass show courts needed to host a top-tier PSA event cost anywhere from Rs 45 lakh to over Rs 80 lakh.

That is the hidden reason squash in India stayed locked inside colonial-era clubs like the Bombay Gymkhana and the Roshanara Club for so long, where a lifetime membership alone can cost Rs 12.5 lakh plus tax.

Abhay Singh has publicly pushed for portable glass courts to be set up in public parks and even at landmark sites like the Taj Mahal, just to let ordinary people see the sport up close for once instead of behind a private club gate.

Back to Budapest

Which brings us back to that quiet smile on the court in Hungary.

Senthilkumar’s Budapest run was not luck. He beat England’s Will Salter in straight games, ground past Germany’s Raphael Kandra in four, then pulled off the upset of the tournament against top seed Eain Yow Ng, the Asian Games champion and world No. 18, in straight games.

His semi-final against Veer Chotrani went the distance, five games, and he saved his composure to close it out 12-10 in the decider.

Much of that composure, he credits to his mental coach Paul Price, a former world No. 4 pro from Australia, with whom he built a routine of two daily meditation sessions and a visualisation habit where he pictures matches both from inside his own eyes and from the stands, watching himself play like a spectator would.

None of that mental or physical training shows up on a spreadsheet. But it is, in its own way, an investment too, one made with time and discipline instead of dollars, by a player who once rearranged his entire university degree just to keep it all going.

In June 2024, Senthilkumar married Aaradhana Kasturiraj, herself an international squash player, which at least means the loneliness Singh described has one less edge to it in his own life now. His father still calls him regularly with garment business updates, and Senthilkumar, ever the planner, has already completed a short course in textiles in Paris for whenever this racquet finally gets put down for good.

For now though, it stays in his hand. Eleven titles in, and squash in India finally looks less like a sport people fund out of love alone, and more like one someone might actually build a business around.

Whether that business arrives in time for the players currently eating dinner alone in a hotel room somewhere in England is the question the next two years, on the road to Los Angeles, will have to answer.