Anusha Kutumbale targets consistency as new domestic season opens in Kanpur
On August 21, 2026, Anusha Kutumbale will begin the new domestic season at the UTT National Ranking Table Tennis tournament in Kanpur, aiming for greater consistency after a year of mixed results.
The 23-year-old Indore paddler has spent the past decade with her father Shreesh as her constant presence — coach, mentor and vocal supporter in the hall — as she balances breakthroughs and setbacks. This year she featured in U Mumba TT’s successful Ultimate Table Tennis title defence in July and reached the WTT Feeder final in Vadodara in January, having won the opening National Ranking event in Vadodara in August 2025 before finishing the season seventh in the national rankings and missing selection for India’s Asian Games squad.
She says she has shifted her mental approach to competition and planning. “I have stopped thinking about what my professional career trajectory should be,” she says. “Instead of thinking ahead about what lies ahead, I am just going to leave the planning to somebody else. I am just going to go out there and do what I do.”
Physical preparation has been a key focus: she reports becoming leaner and fitter while retaining muscle and strengthening her core, and credits joining Athletes Aura, a performance centre in Indore, with making fitness habitual rather than an obligation. “Very honestly, the goal was never to lose weight. It was always to become fitter, stronger,” she says. “When everyone uplifted each other, I started to actually want to become fitter, want to become stronger. And it became part of the routine,” she says. “Personally also, it helped me a lot with how I see myself, be it with self-image or with discipline.”
She points to her run in the Vadodara national ranking event as evidence the work paid off: after four demanding matches in a day she woke up prepared for a semifinal against Diya Chitale and felt the difference. “That was the time when I knew that the work I had put in for my fitness had paid me,” she says. Her improved durability carried into UTT, where she played a part in U Mumba’s title defence and embraced the decisive moments. “My coaches (John Murphy and Jay Modak) and my team prepped me really, really well,” she says. “Right from day one, they’ve been telling me to just go out there, play my game and enjoy the feeling of being in a situation where I do get a lot of attention. I see it as attention and not as pressure and just try to enjoy myself.”
Her father remains central to her process both on and off the court; she describes him as the foundation of her career while acknowledging the emotional strain of a parent-coach relationship. “He is like the backbone. Without him, I cannot stand,” Anusha says of her father. “In the back of my mind, I am having conversations with him when I am playing, even when he is not there.” She also accepts there have been clashes but says the bond endures. “But I trust him more than anything in the world,” she says. “Whenever I am in a clutch moment, I remember him and all the strength comes to me.” “We have really worked consciously towards that,” she says. “No matter what happens on the table, even if you have the worst fights and he has to deal with a lot of my tantrums, end of the day, I still go and sit in his lap and hug him and everything is OK.”
Her immediate focus is the Kanpur National Ranking tournament, where she will seek another strong showing after last season’s peaks and troughs; the event offers a chance to convert recent physical and mental changes into consistent results.