May 2025 Athlete of the Month
By Del Moon, NSGA Storyteller
Photo courtesy Dr. Rajeev Trehan.
Dr. Rajeev Trehan has a secret weapon he uses to defeat opponents in badminton, and it’s not because he was born in India, where the sport originated. It’s not because he has played most of his life. What is it?
His mind.
“I’m what you could call a neuropsychiatrist – I have been board-certified in both neurology and psychiatry for more than 30 years,” he says. After becoming an internist in his native India, Rajeev came to the United States in 1981. He refined his specialties in the Yale medical system before becoming a professor and chief of staff of Veterans Administration hospitals. He has been based at the Eastern Kansas VA Medical Center in Topeka for 20 years.
His secret weapon is a powerful understanding of how the brain drives both the physiology and psychology of sport.
“The funny thing is that when you look at the specialties of medicine, they focus on different body parts, like cardiology is the heart, and gastroenterology is the intestines, for example,” he explains. “But you have two medical specialties, neurology and psychiatry, devoted to the brain. If you do both specialties as I do, then you have the whole brain to work with.”
Badminton, which is the most-played sport in the world behind soccer, turns out to be the perfect example. “This is a sport that has a racket and an object called a birdie or a shuttle. It requires focus on the object. It requires agility and mobility. It requires anticipation. It requires skill. It requires trickery. It requires psychology,” he observes. “Movement of the body requires a coordination between the neurological wiring of the body and the muscles, and is connected to the eye and all the other things.
“So it is a whole body and mind kind of activity, and I don’t know that there could be anything better,” he continues. “Certainly, there’s no medicine invented that could do this.”
From the Hospital to the Olympics
Photo courtesy Dr. Rajeev Trehan.
Rajeev started with Kansas Senior Games as soon as he was eligible to enter and competed in his first National Senior Games in Louisville in 2007. He has been to every Games since except Pittsburgh in 2023. “I had a competing event at the same time, the National Veterans Wheelchair Games in Portland, so I couldn’t make it,” he says.
Rajeev is a national classifier for para badminton and wears the hat of medical lead and head physician for USA Badminton, the governing body of the sport in this country.
His association began when he served as a line judge at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. “That was really my entry into the world of badminton in the U.S., and after the Atlanta Olympics, I came to know the community here,” he recalls. “I went on to be a field-of-play official doing scorekeeping projection at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and the Athens Olympics in 2004. Then I became a national umpire for badminton in the U.S. and I have done some international events. From there my medical expertise came into play with USA Badminton.”
There’s another credit with a Senior Games connection: Rajeev introduced badminton to the National Veterans Golden Age Games, one of NSGA’s qualifying events dedicated to veterans.
Why Badminton Remains King of Racket Sports
Rajeev returned to his home state of Assam in northeastern India in 2023 and found the Indian Railways Officers Club where he learned to play racket sports almost 60 years ago. “It’s still there!” Photo courtesy Dr. Rajeev Trehan.
Rajeev is happy to see more people get involved in all racket sports and welcomes the pickleball phenomenon. “I’m a little bit envious of the beauty and the popularity of pickleball in America, and I must say that from a public health perspective, it is probably the best thing that has happened to American healthcare. It has all these same qualities that I mentioned for badminton and people take to it much more easily.”
However, the shuttle master still sees his sport as supreme. “There are many racket sports in the world. Badminton is the only racket sport that does not have a ball, and the fastest object of any racket sport is the shuttlecock. Who could imagine, a piece of cork with 16 feathers stuck into it? But still, none of tennis’ fastest serves are equal in speed to the fastest shuttlecock which can exceed 300 miles per hour.
“So badminton is the old grandfather of all these others,” he concludes. “We thought it might go away, but it’s not dying. Badminton has been around for 200 hundred years and it isn’t going away.“
As much as his involvement has expanded, Rajeev still finds the boyish joy of his pastime. “I did not study so much then, and that must have caused worry to my parents, but I was out every evening and just spent hours and hours playing sports,” he says. “While I’m doing all of these things professionally and with organized badminton, I’m basically a player.”
