Coaching Beyond: Meet Indian cricket’s coaching whisperers
While Ravi Shastri, Bharat Arun, and R Sridhar were guiding India to famous wins, they were studying another problem: who coaches the coaches? Their answer is now reshaping how cricket is taught across the country.
How many cricket coaches work in India? Nobody knows. There is no registry, no official count, and no coordinating body. What is known: fewer than 10,000 hold any formal qualification.
Ravi Shastri, Bharat Arun, and Sridhar Ramakrishnan recognised this imbalance while coaching India’s most successful cricket team. Inside Covid-era bio-bubbles, they began discussing what might endure beyond trophies. Three months after stepping down, they established Coaching Beyond Private Limited—a venture to train those who train cricketers.
Since then, the company has certified over 1,600 coaches, established partnerships with state associations, and become profitable. Financial filings from Tofler show revenue of Rs 9.1 crore for FY24, up nearly 60% from the previous year. Yet the company remains little known outside cricket’s inner circles. Coaching Beyond is not just another academy; it is a system.
The missing middle
India’s coaching ecosystem is vast but uneven. “In many cities and metros, there are academies on every corner,” Bela Desai, one of the company’s directors, told The State of Play. “We realised there was a huge scope for us to explore in India and beyond for coach education and performance training.”
The Board of Control for Cricket in India’s Centre of Excellence (formerly the National Cricket Academy) runs 10-15 certification courses annually via hybrid learning—MS Teams sessions with one day on-site. The courses are free, but access is restricted to state association nominees, typically former state or international cricketers. The nomination process is often tied to power dynamics within associations, creating a bottleneck.
The International Cricket Council’s equivalent courses cost Rs 1.5 lakh. “Many coaches either can’t get nominated in the BCCI system or can’t afford the ICC course,” Bharat Arun, the former India bowling coach and one of the founders, told The State of Play.
Between the few thousand certified coaches at the top and the countless ones teaching without credentials at the grassroots, there was no bridge. Coaching Beyond set out to build one.
But how?
