This morning, I watched a boy of about twelve lose a point he had every right to win, and instead of folding, he caught his coach’s eye, breathed out, and reset his feet for the next rally. That small, almost invisible exchange is why I am writing this. For the past several years, I have been playing badminton in Mumbai at two wonderful academies in Santacruz West, and what I have found there is not really about the sport at all. It is about the rare and beautiful thing that happens when a steady teacher meets a striving student, and how character is passed in a glance long before it is taught in a drill.
I came to badminton expecting fitness and a clear head. I did not expect a quiet education in human nature. Yet on those courts, I keep meeting questions I usually only encounter in a coaching room: how does composure travel from one person to another, why do some teachers make us braver simply by standing nearby, and what does it actually mean to lose well?
Two academies, one quiet excellence
I train at two places, and I am genuinely moved by both.
The first is the Kiran Tanmay Badminton Academy (KTBA) at BSNL Colony, Santacruz West, led by Head Coach Tanmay Kolwankar. What strikes me about Tanmay is his patience. He corrects a grip or a footwork pattern without ever making the player feel small, and he gives the same unhurried attention to a nervous beginner that he gives to his strongest junior. There is an old-fashioned discipline in how he teaches, the kind that builds something that lasts. He will stay back an extra fifteen minutes simply because a child has finally understood a shot and wants to do it once more, while it is alive in the body.
The second is the Future Shuttlers Badminton Academy (FSBA) at All India Balkan-Ji-Bari, Santacruz West, led by Head Coach Aditya Krishnan. Aditya reads temperament the way great coaches read a rally. He knows who needs a firm word and who needs a softer one, and he builds confidence so quietly that players only notice it weeks later, when they are suddenly attempting shots they would once have ducked. He has built a culture on his court where you clap for an opponent’s good drop, where effort is honoured over ego, and where the youngest player in the room still feels they belong.
Different in style, both coaches share something I have come to value enormously: they are teaching people, not just strokes.
The science of borrowed steadiness
Here is the idea I keep returning to. I call it borrowed steadiness: the calm a young player absorbs from a regulated coach before they are able to generate it themselves. You see it in that glance after the lost point. The student has not yet built an internal anchor, so for a moment, they use the coach’s.
This is not a poetic flourish. It is close to what neuroscientists describe as co-regulation, the process by which one settled nervous system helps stabilise another through tone, breath, posture and presence. A child’s stress response narrows their attention and stiffens their movement. A coach who stays unbothered communicates safety at a bodily level, and the player’s system softens enough to think again. Borrowed steadiness is simply that exchange, repeated thousands of times across a season, until the borrowed thing becomes their own.
I have watched both Tanmay and Aditya do this without any apparent effort. They almost never raise their voice when a point goes wrong. They model the composure they want, and the court slowly fills with it.
Sportsmanship is a relationship, not a rule
We tend to treat sportsmanship as a code of conduct, a list of polite behaviours. I have come to see it as a by-product of relationship. Decades of relationship research in sport psychology describe the bond between coach and athlete through closeness, commitment and cooperation, and they consistently find that the quality of that bond predicts not only performance but well-being. In plain terms, players treat the game well when they feel well-treated by the person teaching it.
This is where our older language of the guru-shishya relationship still earns its keep. At its best, it is not hierarchy for its own sake. It is a trusted bond in which one person’s mastery is held in service of another’s growth. I see it in how these students carry themselves: they shake hands after a thrashing, they retrieve a stray shuttle for a stranger on the next court, they apologise for a net cord even when it wins them the point. Nobody printed those manners on a poster. They were caught, not taught, from coaches who embody them. Strong role models shape us less through instruction than through example.
Sit with three questions for a moment. Who was the steady presence that once lent you a composure you did not yet own? Whose calm do you still borrow when a hard moment arrives? And for whom, today, are you that anchor without realising it?
Borrowed steadiness is the calm a young player absorbs from a steady coach before they can produce it themselves. We do not teach character. We lend it, glance by glance, until the other person can hold their own.
What the court teaches the boardroom
None of this stays on the court. The same dynamic governs every leader I coach. Teams do not absorb strategy decks. They absorb the regulated or panicked state of whoever is leading them, exactly as a junior player absorbs a coach. A manager who stays composed when a launch fails is teaching resilience more effectively than any workshop, because the nervous system learns from presence before it learns from words.
There is a quieter lesson too, drawn from yogic thinking. The best players I watch treat each point as complete in itself. They are fully committed to the rally, then they let the score go. That practised non-attachment is also what keeps the rest of us in any long pursuit. Most people abandon a craft not when it gets hard but when it gets repetitive, which is why understanding why we lose interest matters as much as talent. The steady ones simply keep showing up for the next point, and the next, long after the novelty has gone.
That is the real gift of these two academies and the two men who run them. They are not only producing better badminton in Mumbai. They are quietly building steadier human beings, one borrowed breath at a time.
If you have a coach, a mentor or a teacher who once lent you their composure when you had none of your own, perhaps send them a line of thanks this week. And if you have been carrying something heavy alone and could use a steadier presence to think alongside, you are welcome to book a fifteen-minute conversation with me. One honest exchange is often where the borrowing begins.
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