Inside Sumit Nagal's toughest season: Climbing back after a ranking slide

Bengaluru: Sumit Nagal dropped his kit bag and stared at it for a moment before reaching for his rackets. He could barely look at the graphite sticks. A part of him wanted to obliterate them.

The 28-year-old had just lost in straight sets to Frenchman Geoffrey Blancaneaux in the first round of an ATP Challenger in Lyon in early June. It was a defeat that stung — Nagal hadn’t dropped a set in four previous meetings with Blancaneaux.



Sensing the storm brewing inside India’s No.1, coach Sascha Nensel stepped in. He grabbed the bag and told Nagal to take a break, to simply get away from the tennis court.

“Those back-to-back tournaments in Heilbronn and Lyon were bad,” Nagal says six months later, leaning forward in his seat at a luxury hotel in Bengaluru. “I was playing such bad tennis. I was missing, making a lot of errors. I’m hitting the ball, but I don’t know where it is going. It’s the worst place to be for a tennis player. Lyon was rock bottom.”

From there, Nagal and Yash Pandey, friend and sports physiotherapist, drove nearly 370 km to the Swiss resort town of Interlaken. Over the next five days, the duo hiked through the Bernese Alps. They spoke occasionally, and slowly the weight Nagal had been carrying through the first half of 2025 began to lift.

The slump had consequences. Nagal’s ranking fell out of the top 300 in the second half of last year, pushing him out of even the qualifying fields of Grand Slams. The slide felt steep because it came on the heels of his best season yet, when he had climbed to a career-high No.68.

In a sport where the number beside a name becomes the player’s identity, the drop has meant that, for the first time in two years, Nagal, ranked No.277 this week, will miss the Australian Open from Jan 18. Instead, he will start his 2026 campaign next week in Bengaluru at an ATP 125 Challenger, where he’ll hope to kickstart his return to the top 100.

“You are top 100, you don’t play well and in four months you are 180,” Nagal says. “Nobody likes to be 300 whatever. The tournaments are very different, prize money is different. The hardest part for me was that I wasn’t playing at the level I wanted to play. The mental part too is a challenge; you struggle with motivation.”

A low-grade temperature early in 2025 disrupted Nagal’s schedule. It didn’t help either that he didn’t have much of a pre-season.

“Going forward, I will do pre-seasons for four to six weeks, playing a maximum of one league, because that’s what works best for my body and my game,” he says.

Some of the missteps, Nagal admits, came down to inexperience at that level. “This was the first time I was 68 in the world,” he says. “There were some matches when I was 80 or 90 that I could have done better in. It was a learning experience.”

At 5 ft 11, Nagal relies heavily on his legs and all-round consistency. In hindsight, he feels he should have put the rackets away even for a week the moment mental focus began to slip.

“I should have come home, for some love and ghar ka khana — mooli parathas, cheeni roti…” he says, laughing, his eyes lighting up.