Ivy League hoopsters are Division I athletes on the court and exceptionally accomplished and eclectic humans off it. Ivy Hoops Online presents the latest edition of our Off the Bench series that takes fans inside the stories that you might not otherwise know from the stands or through your screen.
Radhika Garapaty ’29 takes center court in our next installment in the series. After nearly a full year away from basketball due to injury, the rising Yale women’s basketball sophomore has found inspiring answers to the hardest question an athlete has to answer: Who am I without the game? And as she finds her way back into the lineup at Payne Whitney Gymnasium with her teammates, she is bringing strengths she may not have known she possessed before.
“Nothing happens to you. Everything happens for you,” Garapaty insists.
Garapaty was the first in her family to pursue college athletics, which meant learning early to advocate for herself.
“I didn’t play in the big showcases,” she recalls, “so it was up to me to have coaches see what I could do.”
Injury was never part of the plan.
As she rehabs from a second ACL tear, she says she is “still in the process of figuring out [her] identity outside of basketball.”
There’s a lot to figure out when you’re forced to spend months away from a sport that has shaped so much of your life.
Garapaty says she was obsessed with basketball from the beginning—loving the sport, staying relentlessly focused and sacrificing other things in pursuit of excellence. For as long as she can remember, the first thing she touched before bed was a basketball, and it was the last thing she looked at each night.
Looking back now, she says with maturity beyond her years, “The downside is that you can lose yourself.”
Three of the past five years have been spent rehabbing injuries, forcing Garapaty to rethink what strength really looks like. Her biggest takeaway?
“It’s OK to lean on people,” she says. “It’s okay to ask for help.”
For someone whose instinct had always been “I’ve got it,” accepting support became one of recovery’s hardest lessons—and one of its most important.
“It’s very hard to care for others when you’re not at your greatest,” Garapaty reasoned.
Garapaty is choosing to see her own injuries less as obstacles and more as opportunities to learn how she responds to adversity. Her resilient perspective is shaping her physical recovery for basketball, but also much more.
An Economics major who devours books on leadership and entrepreneurship, Garapaty laughs that she can’t get enough of “Shark Tank.” She’s equally unafraid to cold-email business leaders just to learn how they think.
This summer, an internship with BetterHelp is giving her language for something she knew firsthand: When athletes are sidelined by injury, they lose not just playing time, but community, identity and purpose.
The ideas that have emerged from her internship and personal experience have evolved into Handl, an early-stage venture Garapaty is slowly building for athletes navigating injury or illness. For now, Handl exists as an Instagram community; eventually, she hopes it becomes an app where athletes can find encouragement, practical advice and, most importantly, each other. At its core is a simple idea: Athletes do not have to navigate recovery alone.
More immediately, as she enters a new academic year and next season, her ambitions for herself are seemingly simple.
“My number one priority is to be healthy,” she asserts.
After years of calibrating success via the stat sheet, Garapaty has learned to appreciate progress that can’t always be found in the box score. She looks forward to returning to the court. But she’s equally determined to keep learning from teammates, coaches and the people around her.
“I want to be a sponge,” Garapaty declared.
Garapaty’s outlook has led her to change the advice she gives younger athletes chasing big dreams, including her younger brother.
“It’s easy,” she reflects, “to become consumed by the next workout, the next game or the next goal.”
Instead, Garapaty encourages those who may look up to her to pause every so often.
“Zoom out a couple [of] times,” she says. “It’s very important to look at how far you’ve come.”
She’s learning that joy deserves as much attention as achievement.
“Having fun is super-important,” she says.
With the expectations she places on herself, patience has become another skill to practice—as has listening to her own voice of reason.
“When you break it down and take a step back, you can’t let the opinions of other people, positive or negative, get through,” Garapaty advised. “You can’t move into that noise. You tackle healing one day at a time.”
A book Garapaty returns to often, “How Champions Think” by Bob Rotella, reflects her growing interest in the mental side of performance: not only mental strength, but mental health.
Garapaty has become fascinated not only by how the body heals, but by the mental aspects of recovery—patience, perspective and resilience.
“I think a lot,” she admits with a laugh, adding that her mind often moves “100 miles an hour.”
Learning to slow down has taught her to stay present rather than constantly looking ahead.
That balance between patience and initiative has become central to how Garapaty approaches life beyond basketball—trusting the process while creating her own opportunities.
“When you put yourself out there and you take initiative for yourself,” she says, “opportunities won’t just come to you. It’s your job to go and grab them.”
