Meet Dipika Pallikal, the Squash queen of India

New Delhi: Dipika Pallikal is first Indian squash player to break into the top 10 in the WSA rankings. She won 3 WISPA tour titles in 2011 that saw her attain a career best ranking of 13. Later, she bettered that with a top 10 ranking in December 2012 She was runner up in the Tournament of Champions 2012 and reached the semifinals of Australian Open 2012. She won her sixth WSA title by winning the Meadowood Pharmacy Open on February 2013. The Squash beeauty Dipika Pallikal, currently ranked 12 in the world, hoped to break into the top-10 before the end of the year but she did could not progress beyond first round in Hong Kong in December.But she is confident that someday she would climb to be world No. 1. The 22-year-old has won seven Tour titles and planns to participate in bigger tournaments to reach her goal of being world No. 1. "My plan for next year was to start with smaller tournaments. But having won a $25,000 event, my aim is to stay in the same bracket before moving to $50,000 and World Series events. A lot, including my training regime, changed. My coach Sarah Fitz-Gerald said, 'my squash has become more mature' and I hope it's the beginning of a lot of good things."Lets know more about her. Dipika Pallikal, also known as Dipika Rebecca Pallika was born on 21 September 1991 in a Malayali Syrian Christian family to Sanjiv and Susan Pallikal from Kerala in Chennai, India. She played her first international tournament in London when she was in her sixth grade, and to date, she has won the German Open, Dutch Open, French Open, Australian Open, Scottish Open on the European Junior Squash Circuit. Pallikal turned professional in 2006, but her career was filled with ups and downs initially. She became more consistent and started notching up winning performances after her brief training stint in Egypt in the beginning of 2011. She clinched her first of three WISPA titles for 2011 in September by winning the Orange County Open in Irvine, California. She notched up her second in the United States with another WISPA tour event victory. The third came in Hong Kong in the Crocodile Challenge Cup in December 2011 and that took her to number 17 in world rankings. However it was her performance in the World Open that shot her into the limelight. She finished in the top eight. She claimed a ranking of 14 as a result of these victories in February 2012, surpassing the earlier best world ranking by an Indian - 27th by former national champion Misha Grewal in 1995. In January 2012, she became the first Indian ever to reach the summit clash of a Silver event when she reached the final of the Tournament of Champions squash meet in New York. In August same year, she went one step further when she reached the semifinals of a gold event, the 2012 Australian Open, another first for an Indian. Pallikal was an integral part of the Indian squash team that finished fifth in the 2012 Women's World Team Squash Championships. India, seeded tenth in the event, defeated higher ranked Netherlands and Ireland in the process. She defeated players like Madeline Perry in the tournament. Joshna Chinappa was another key player in the Indian line-up. In February 2013, She won her sixth WSA title of her career after outplaying Joey Chan of Hong Kong 11-9, 11-7, 11-4 in the final of the Meadowood Pharmacy Open in the Canadian city of Winnipeg. In December 2012, she broke into the top 10 by achieving a career best of ranking of 10. She became the first Female Squash player to be conferred with the Arjuna Award, India's second highest sporting award in the year 2012.Pallikal trains at the ICL-TNSRA Academy at Chennai under Cyrus Poncha and Major (rtd) S. Maniam. Her coach is the six time world champion, Sarah Fitz-Gerald to whom she attributes most of her recent success.