India's Best Soft Tennis Player Keeps Getting This Close to History

Jay Meena has spent nearly a decade being one match away from making Indian sporting history, and he keeps coming agonizingly short of actually getting there.

A sport most fans have never heard of

Soft tennis is played with the same court and scoring logic as regular tennis, but with a lighter, slower ball and loosely strung rackets, and it's genuinely massive in parts of East Asia. Japan, South Korea, and Chinese Taipei dominate it at a level closer to how those countries dominate table tennis internationally. Almost nobody outside the region follows it, which is exactly why Jay Meena's career is worth knowing about in the first place.

At the 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou, Meena beat two of the world's top-ranked players en route to the men's singles quarterfinals, then lost 1-4 to eventual silver medalist Chang Yu Sung of Chinese Taipei, the sport's dominant nation by a wide distance. One win away from India's first-ever medal in the sport. He didn't get it that day.

Building a career nobody at home is watching

He kept building anyway rather than fading afterward. In 2024, Meena partnered with Aadhya Tiwari to win bronze in mixed doubles at the World Soft Tennis Championships in South Korea, India's first-ever medal at that event in the sport's history. In 2025, he became the first Indian to medal at the Asian Soft Tennis Championships too, taking bronze after reaching the semifinals there as well.

By any reasonable measure, Meena has built one of the most quietly accomplished careers in Indian sport outside the country's handful of marquee disciplines like cricket and badminton. He's simply doing it in a sport that gets almost no domestic coverage at all back home.

The 2026 campaign, and the structural problem underneath it

At this year's Asian Games in Nagoya, Meena led India's men's team through a group stage that included wins over Laos and Mongolia and a loss to group-toppers Chinese Taipei, advancing to the quarterfinals before falling to Indonesia there. His singles and mixed doubles campaigns continued into the tournament's later rounds alongside longtime partner Tiwari, both competing in their third Asian Games together as India's most experienced pairing in the sport.

Specialist sports like this face a structural problem that has nothing to do with talent at all. There's no domestic professional league to speak of, minimal broadcast coverage, and almost no sponsorship pipeline, which means athletes like Meena build entire careers largely invisible to the audience that would actually be interested if they simply knew the sport existed at this level.

For Meena, another deep run could be another chance to finally turn years of near-misses into a breakthrough.

Meena is 26 now, and this generation of Indian soft tennis players, built almost entirely around him and Tiwari, is close to its peak at the same moment. The question worth asking isn't whether Meena is good enough anymore. It's how many more near-misses a sport needs before someone starts paying attention to it before the medal arrives, not only after.