Sourabh Verma

Sourabh Verma is an international badminton player from India. Born on December 30th, 1992, the 25 year old hails from Dhar district in Madhya Pradesh. He currently resides in Hyderabad and trains under the tutelage of National coach Pullela Gopichand.

Background

Sourabh was introduced to badminton at a very young age by his father, Sudhir Verma. he , along with his younger brother Sameer, trained together and made it to the national championships on their own. Both soon joined the gopichand National Academy to hone their skills.

Debut

Sourabh debuted in 2011 after he became the National champion in the men’s singles category. He soon won his first international tournament in the same year and followed it up with silver in another tournament.

Rise to Glory

After winning the National championships in 2011, Sourabh won the Bahrain International challenge. He then became the runner up in Syed Modi Grand Prix where he lost to Taufiq Hidayat, who was a former Olympic Champion.

After back to back triumphs, Sourabh soon started to be known as the next big thing in Indian badminton. He also reached a career high singles ranking of world no. 30 in October 2012.

2013 and 2014 were perhaps the best years of his short career so far, were he won three consecutive titles- Tata International Challenge, Mumbai, Iran fajr international Challenge and the Austrian International Challenge. He came close to winning the Malaysia Grand prix and also competed at the Asian Games in South Korea.

Lows

In his 7 year career so far, he hasn’t seen much of the lows yet. However, he is yet to give consistent performances like his brother Sameer. He doesn’t have a great record against many of the top players like Chen Long, Kidambi Srikanth and all. His numbers don’t speak for the talent he has. However, of late he has defeated legends like Lin Dan and is improving. He hopes that his hard work would give him better results in the future.

Club(Pro badminton League)

Sourabh was bought by the Ahmedabad Smash Masters for an amount of 16 lacs in the 2017 auctions.

He has played exceedingly well for the Smash Masters for the last 2 years, even though the team overall is yet to win the title. Their best performance till date is their semis final appearance in 2017.

He has nearly 166 career wins, with all of them coming in the men’s singles category. He currently ranks 50th as of October 2018, but it it is still early days for this budding shuttler. He still has a lot to achieve in his career and with the promise and talent that he possesses, it is not tough to say he might become one of the best shuttlers in the world.