after bagging bronze medals at the asian squash team championships in malaysia indian women squash players sound excited about having played for the country after a gap of two years with the commonwealth games and asian games coming up in 2022 they say the focus is towards that and this event helped assess themselves as a team and understand what needs to be worked on excerpts from a chat with joshna chinappa sunayna kuruvilla urwashi joshi and aparajitha balamurukanhow was it to play for india after a long gap due to the pandemicsunayna the last team event that i played was the saf games in 2019 that was a good one as we won a gold in the team event also i won a silver in the individuals so going into this event all of us were really excited because we were going to play a team event after so longjoshna this was the first event in more than two years wearing the india jersey but ive been playing psa tournaments all around the world since october last year but playing for india has always been something that i would look forward to since my junior daysas players what have been the challenges since the start of the pandemic and what keeps you goingjoshna one challenge was not really knowing when i would play next this year i was away from home for almost four months it was living out of a suitcase i couldnt come back to india because india was in lockdown and travellers from india were not allowed in other countries so to play tournaments i had to stay away for four months from home the expenses also shot up because you would be paying for a lot of stuff on your own i was shuttling between egypt america and england it was fun in a way but the uncertainty of which tournament i would play next when i would go home next made things difficultsunayna i think ive played four events this whole year thats disappointing usually i play in about 1012 events a year so it was really difficult to stay motivated to continue training with that same drive i would try to remind myself that the reason why i did it was because i enjoyed playingurwashi it has been challenging to stay motivated but taking one day at a time has been helpful also setting up shortterm goals and focusing on achieving them directs my attention towards them rather than thinking about whats happening aroundjoshna im looking forward to playing at the commonwealth games and the asian games in 2022 and that is helping me stay focused i have a great team i work with my coach hadrian stiff in england has been very supportive while in chennai i train at the indian squash academy and the coaches there are helpful the tneb where i work and the sponsors have been supportive so they have all been playing a part in keeping me motivatedhow