Vipul Yashovardhan was fourteen or fifteen when he had to talk his parents into letting him join a judo club. He is eighteen now, and he trains at the Sports Authority of India's National Centre of Excellence in Bhopal — the tier of the Indian sports system that most people in Jammu only ever read about.
He is from Ward No. 9, Kathua.
The part nobody tells you
The story that usually gets told about an athlete from a small town involves a coach who spots them early. Vipul's does not. He started in sport at ten or eleven. By his own account he got little encouragement from school PE teachers, and taught himself from the internet — which is to say he learned judo from videos before he ever learned it from a person.
The person came at fourteen or fifteen, at the Unbeatable Sports Club in Kathua, and only after he had convinced his parents. That is two barriers most talent-identification stories skip past: no institutional interest, and a family that had to be persuaded that this was not a waste of a school year.
What he had done by then
Enough, it turns out. He won the Sub-Junior National Championship in 2018-19 at Una, Himachal Pradesh. He has represented J&K nationally, and reached the quarter-finals of an Asian international championship.
In 2023 he cleared the selection trials for the SAI National Centre of Excellence at Bhopal, and has been there three years. He is now in the second year of a B.P.Ed at IES College, Bhopal — the detail that matters most for anyone reading this as a plan rather than a profile. The NCOE route does not ask you to give up a degree; it runs alongside one.
His head coach at Bhopal, Ajay Singh Ruhil, puts it this way: "I have been training him since 2023. He joined SAI Bhopal as a senior player and is one of our promising players. We are hopeful that he will get us an international medal."
How the NCOE door actually opens
This is the useful part, and it is worth being precise about because the vagueness is what stops people trying.
Entry to a SAI National Centre of Excellence is by selection trials, assessed through SAI's Selection Committee and its Talent Identification and Development Committee. It is not an application you submit off the street, and it is not a scholarship you write an essay for. You are selected on performance and assessment.
Which means the practical path runs backwards from the trial, not forwards from ambition: you need a competitive record that gets you into the room. In Vipul's case that record was a sub-junior national title and J&K representation — earned through a club and a state association, not through a school.
So the sequence for a young athlete in the Jammu belt looks like this. Find a club or a district association in your sport. Get affiliated, because entry to ranking and national-level competition runs through the association chain and an individual cannot simply enter. Build a result. The trial is the last step, not the first.
What an NCOE actually gives you
The centres exist because the gap between a good district athlete and an international one is mostly made of things a club cannot afford: a full-time coach, a strength and conditioning programme, physiotherapy, sports science support, controlled diet, and — the underrated one — training partners at your own level every day. A judoka in Kathua can train hard. What they cannot do is find twenty people to grapple who are all as good as they are.
Bhopal's centre is one of a network SAI runs across the country in specific disciplines. Being posted to one is not a prize; it is a place of work, with a daily schedule and performance review attached. Athletes are retained on the basis of progress.
The second name on the list
Vipul is not alone at Bhopal. Suhaib Mughal, 23, from Poonch, is also training at the NCOE. Poonch is outside the belt this site normally covers, but the pairing is the point: two athletes from two very different corners of J&K, in the same national centre, having taken the same route in.
What is missing from this story
Worth naming honestly. Neither Vipul's competition schedule for the coming season nor any target event has been published, so there is no date to watch for yet. And the report this account rests on is a single feature — a substantial one, with a named and quoted coach and a verifiable competition history, but a single source nonetheless.
What is not in doubt is the shape of it. A teenager in Kathua with no school support and no obvious pathway found a club, won a national age-group title, and cleared a trial into the national system — while staying in education. Every link in that chain exists in the Jammu division right now. The Khel Gaon academies in Nagrota, the district associations, the college circuit: none of them is a substitute for the others, and all of them are the route.
The part Vipul supplied himself was the two years before anyone was watching.
Source: Daily Excelsior
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