Jensi Kanabar: The 14-year-old Indian tennis prodigy following Sania Mirza’s path

Watching Steffi Graf play at Wimbledon in the early 1990s left such an impression on Imran Mirza that he wondered whether his young daughter should take up the sport. He acted on it, setting in motion the illustrious career of Sania Mirza, the greatest female player India has produced so far.

Whether Graf has done it again will be known in the years to come, but the rapid progress of Jensi Kanabar suggests that perhaps a sequel is in the making. On September 14, the 14-year-old made her debut in the Top 50 of the ITF Junior Rankings.

Dipakbhai Kanabar, Jensi’s father, was a big fan of Graf and, when he was blessed with a daughter in 2011, there was no doubt in his mind. “I used to follow tennis with a keen interest. She was my favourite player and I wanted Jensi to be a player like her,” he tells  Sportstar.

Accordingly, Dipakbhai, a schoolteacher by profession, started sending three-and-a-half-year-old Jensi for tennis coaching at the local gymkhana in Junagadh, a city in western Gujarat with a population of roughly five lakh.

Bio

Age: 14

From: Junagadh, Gujarat

Education: Currently in Class 10th at Dr. Subhash Arya Kanya Vidyalaya, Junagadh

Discipline: Tennis (left-handed)

Parents: Dipakbhai and Rashmiben Kanabar

Mentor: Dipakbhai Kanabar

Idols: Novak Djokovic, Steffi Graf and Iga Swiatek

But unlike Graf, the player Dipakbhai idolised, Jensi is left-handed. How did that happen?

Dipakbhai describes it as “a blunder”.

“When I sent Jensi to train for the first time under Somnath bhai, who himself was 16-17 years old at the time, he asked her to throw a ball. When she threw it with her left hand, the ball went further. So, he assumed it was Jensi’s stronger hand. I wasn’t even aware of this until Jensi had completed a year of training.”

When he found out, Dipakbhai did ask around whether she should switch to the right hand, but he was advised against it.

In 2019, when she was eight and had participated in a few local competitions, Jensi played her first national-level tournament — an U12 AITA event in Rajkot.

But soon, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, bringing an end to tournaments and leaving Jensi with just training at the gymkhana.

That period prompted Dipakbhai to take a major step in shaping his daughter’s career. “I realised that she could not get high-level coaching at the gymkhana anymore,” he recalls.

So, he and three friends, who also had young children playing tennis, rented a piece of land and turned it into two clay courts in 2022.

While the children of those friends now train in Ahmedabad, he and his team continue to coach Jensi for seven hours a day on the same clay courts in Junagadh. Dipakbhai teaches at a government school in Anandpur, a village close to the city.

“I have had a great experience with tennis so far. I enjoy playing it,” says Jensi.

Jensi Kanabar with her father, Dipakbhai.

Early success

In 2024, Jensi got her first experience of playing outside India. At the Asian U14 Junior Championships in Cambodia, she lost to the top seed in the second round.

Last year, she was invited to play an U14 girls’ event at Wimbledon.

In September, she made her debut on the ITF junior circuit as a main-draw wildcard at a J30 event in Ahmedabad. She ended it by winning the title. She followed that up by extending her winning streak at the J60, a slightly bigger event, in Guwahati in November. Around the new year, she also had her first taste of the senior circuit at a W15 tournament in Guwahati.

This year, she further cemented her status as one of the continent’s up-and-coming juniors when she won the Australian Open Asia-Pacific Elite Under-14 Trophy in January.

Recognising her achievement, Anil Ranavasiya, the then Collector of Junagadh, made an extraordinary announcement. “When Jensi came back after winning the title in Australia, our collector renamed the courts at the local gymkhana as ‘Kumari Jensi Kanabar Tennis Courts’,” reveals Dipakbhai.

A few months later, Jensi wrote her name into the history books of Indian tennis. At W15 Delhi in April, she broke Sania’s record, by around two weeks, for being the youngest Indian woman to reach the semifinals of a senior professional event.

Since then, she has continued to grind on the junior circuit with remarkable consistency. Winning the biggest title of her young career at the J200 in Astana earlier this month propelled her into the Top 100 in the junior circuit, while a J300 semifinal finish the following week at the same venue took her into the Top 50.

Achievements

1. Broke into the Junior Top 50 rankings on September 14, 2026.

2. Reached the semifinals of a W15 tournament in Delhi in April, only her second event on the senior circuit. In the process, she broke Sania Mirza’s record of being the youngest Indian woman to reach the quarterfinals and semifinals of a senior professional tournament.

3. First Indian girl to win the Australian Open Asia-Pacific Elite Under-14 Trophy.

4. Titles — J200 (Astana, 2026), J60 (Guwahati, 2025), J30 (Ahmedabad, 2025).

The road ahead

Jensi is more or less set to make the cut for next year’s Junior Grand Slams. The 14-year-old, currently 163cm tall, is used to facing older and stronger players anyway, but the Majors will still be a massive learning experience for her.

As a prodigious talent, it would be an obvious decision for her to join setups such as the academies run in India by former players like Sania or Rohan Bopanna, or even move abroad, probably to Europe.

Dipakbhai says they have received offers from prestigious institutions such as IMG and academies across Europe, but in the near future, they have no plans to send Jensi away. “We are pure vegetarians. We don’t even eat eggs. If she goes abroad, diet could be an issue. Also, right now, she is used to being with me all the time,” says Dipakbhai.

Whether Jensi can come close to emulating Sania is a matter of time, but there is one thing her father is sure of. “When I started this journey with Jensi, we didn’t have a Plan B. Even now, there isn’t one.  Usko tennis player hi banana hai (I only want her to be a tennis player),” he says.

Published on Sep 24, 2026

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