CHENNAI: Vaibhav Sooryavanshi is 15; he has certainly been trained to knock every incoming 145kmph ball into the stands. He has also been taught how to answer the media, and even to a certain extent, been taught how to perform under pressure.
But have you wondered whether that same 15-year-old has been taught how to deal with becoming India’s latest teenage sensation? Or dealing with the pressure that comes with the tag of becoming the next ‘Sachin Tendulkar’?
“Has anyone taught him how to face praise, criticism, the uncertainty and the public expectations placed on him?” Subiksha Raman, Dramatherapist & Counselling Psychologist, Founder at Stage & Stance Co, asks an important question.
“He (Sooryavanshi) has to understand that he is not his performance, but he is an individual. You will have to manage all those experiences through psychological preparation. It shouldn’t be optional, it should be compulsory, when a young athlete starts to train for a high-profile sport,” she adds.
Three matches, and then calls for his omission. Somewhere between walking out to bat and returning to the dressing room, 15-year-old Vaibhav Sooryavanshi had become both India’s next great hope and, for some, a failed experiment.
If that wasn’t enough, a few days later, the youngster was also dropped back to the bench, sending possibly the worst message for budding cricketers in the country.
“He’s an adolescent, all said and done. His identity is still forming, and his brain is still developing. The prefrontal cortex develops till you are 25, so he’s still trying to regulate his emotions and learn to manage different perspectives. When you add in public scrutiny, it can be quite intense for a teenager,” she adds.
“I think a lot of focus is given to how you handle setbacks and failure, but how about success?”
Which is where the fans come in.
Your whole identity is based on your favourite team, favourite player, and more often than not, your mood depends on how they perform. But what the fans fail to realise is that behind every athlete, there’s a human who is already burdened by expectations on his back.
“As fans, for us it is this experience of watching the game but we have to realise that it is a career and profession for someone else,” she raises a point.
“You cannot forget the individuals on the screen, and what they are going through. That’s where fans have to be more mindful because they are real humans, not just scores or names on a scorecard.”
In a sport as brutal as cricket, it is almost impossible to become great overnight, and hence, talents should be backed at every juncture of their path towards becoming great.
“Only when you make mistakes do you grow and learn from them. We are not giving them [athletes] space to figure out the in betweens,” she added. The social media boom has certainly not helped one bit either, as the players are now under scrutiny 24*7 without much accountability.
“In the previous generations, the criticism would have been in the media, say newspapers or news channels. But now we are seeing it in real time, and it can affect the athletes. It is impossible to skip it unless you are living under a rock.”
And Sooryavanshi is hardly the only young Indian athlete to experience the weight of expectation. Gukesh Dommaraju, crowned world champion at 18, has also found himself under intense scrutiny as his results dipped.
More often than not, the vanilla advice given to these athletes is ‘block the noise’. Is it realistic in a country like India, where everyone has an opinion, and the internet is as cheap as a cup of tea?
“‘Block the noise’ is quite unrealistic. As I said, we are all constantly online or have people who are online, so it is impossible to block out what people say. Everything is uploaded in real time, so you get surrounded by all the noise. We have to realise that at the end of the day, even these high-performing athletes are humans,” she states.
That’s where the athletes need to surround themselves with a support system who act as a layer of buffer between the online space and the athletes themselves. The worst thing that an athlete or someone close to them could do is ‘pretend that the noise doesn’t exist’.
“There’s already a lot of noise around you, and every athlete needs to know someone beyond the sport.”
“Of course, their team, coaches and teammates are going to have their back. These athletes need people around them who see them as people and not athletes. It is very important to remind them that they are ‘human beings first’. It helps them stay grounded, win or lose.”
What’s one piece of advice that Subiksha would love to give the athletes?
“You can’t push yourself through the burnout. It is like having a broken bone, and you still push yourself through it. It doesn’t work that way. In that case, you should go back to your support systems and have proper rest in place. There should be some psychological support. These things help you build confidence beyond the field. Athletes see burnout as a weakness.”
“But it is just a sign of the environment that the athlete surrounds themselves with, and the community around them should help them to recover from it.”
Every prodigy is expected to carry the weight of tomorrow even before they have grown into their present form. While the sport is often taught, what’s missing in the system is the basic understanding that these athletes are human first, talents next.
Until that changes, India will continue producing talented athletes and expect them to shoulder extraordinary expectations and burdens.