|
|
Total Number of Subscribers: 467 |
||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
Date:11 January 2009 |
Compiled by Mr. M. Sathya Kumar |
||||
|
|
Greg Chappell Plans tennis ball cricket world cup:
Forms Company and pitches for investments Legendary cricketer, captain, commentator and coach, Chappell is
now co-founder of Soft Ball Cricket International (SBCI) for which he was
seeking investments at the dealflow sessions at TiEcon. The other co-founder
of SBCI is Sohan Singh Negi.
The beauty about entrepreneurship is that you have the
opportunity of running your own business, making your own decisions,
succeeding or failing by your own actions. The big thing is to keep
persevering, keep looking for opportunities, looking for ideas, looking for
things you can get really enthusiastic about. Greg Chappell was one of the star speakers at TiEcon Delhi, last
month. What was not as well known was the fact that the legendary Australian
batsman and former Indian coach was simultaneously pitching for investments
from VCs for his company in order to promote a world championship in tennis
ball cricket. Softball cricket, or tennis ball cricket as it is popularly
known in India, is not exactly a new game. A few countries already have
clubs. The West Indies, for instance, has the West Indies Softball
Association (WISA), where local teams compete with each other. Like T20, it
is considered a faster format of the original version. The number of overs in
an innings varies from twenty to thirty. A lot of successful players,
especially in India, have come via the softball route. In an
exclusive interview, Chappell talks about entrepreneurship, soft ball
cricket, and sports opportunities in India. Tell
us something about your entrepreneurial venture SBCI. Softball Cricket International (SBCI) is a company that I
started with my partner, Sohan Singh. We are looking at setting up an
international structure for the various softball formats — tennis ball cricket or whatever formats they are playing in,
standardize the rules, and the format and play some national and
international tournaments, culminating in a World Cup of softball cricket,
hopefully by the fourth quarter of 2009. How will it generate revenue? There are a variety of ways. The revenue streams would be the
same as for any other event. They can come from a whole range of wings, from
player participation to gate receipts to television sponsorship, all of those
areas. What all sports opportunities do you see in
India? Cricket is my game and I look at opportunities in cricket. There
is a lot happening at the top level, but the bottom of the pyramid is not
being focused on very much. A lot of people only play softball cricket and
never get an opportunity to play hardball cricket. There are limited
opportunities for them. They probably never get a chance to live their dreams
like the guys who reach the top in leather and hardball cricket. So, we would
like to bring professionalism, standardize it, and offer opportunities. I also see it as a great opportunity to discover talent. A lot
of champions of the past and present such as MS Dhoni, Rohit Sharma, S
Sreesanth, Munaf Patel, and Shoaib Akhtar came from tennis ball cricket. So
it is an area where talent can be identified. One of the great challenges of
cricket of the future would be finding and identifying talent. And bringing
talent through the development process is going to be very important. So, I
think softball cricket is an area where, through the modified formats that we
are seeing in the game, we can develop talent and that’s an area I would like to focus on now. And opportunities beyond cricket? I think in the peripheral area of sports, there are various sort
of things. There is fitness, strength, sports science, sports medicine, and
sports nutrition. If you look at some of the elite sports in other parts of
the world, in America and Europe, soccer is a game that has a lot of science
and technology software. They are all areas where I think there is
opportunity. Training methods and training systems are a very important part
of talent development. And I think cricket, unlike other sports, lacks the
understanding of what it is but produces champions [nonetheless]. I have
spent a majority of my time focusing on how we find champions, what is that
produces champions, talking to people who have been successful not only in
cricket, but reading about people who have been successful in other sports
and drawing the similarities that come through. I have come to the conclusion
that it’s not necessarily the academies that do wonder, it’s not necessarily the major cities that the champions come
from, they often come from poor backgrounds, with very little in the way
of infrastructure and training.
Is there an opportunity in setting up
training academies for sports that India is not good at? Training academies have an academic approach. Learning from
experience is more important. Strong competition is a critical part for the
development of the player and so for the team. So, pick a sport like
basketball that India hasn’t been successful at. To
try and develop a team that will be successful at the international stage is
very difficult unless they face strong competition at the local level. So, it’s not as simple as let's take fifteen individuals or
thirty individuals, select them, train them with the best methods, and we
become the best team in the world. It‘s not quite
that
simple. Maybe the structured format of academies is not the best way to go. What are the major challenges in sports
entrepreneurship? They are similar to any other business. I mean, there is a risk in
everything entrepreneurial. If you are trying something that has not been
tried before, it’s always a risk. But there is
always a great reward if you get it right. I suppose the challenge is to make
sure that your success is big and failures are low. What would be your advice to budding sports
entrepreneurs? I would say look at things a bit differently, look a bit deeper,
a bit wider. Don’t just look at the core
business of sports, look at other areas, the services that sports require,
the peripheral industries that grow around sports. Maybe you can find
something that you are interested in. Passion is a very important part of
success in any field. People who are not passionate won’t spend hours and hours that are required to be successful.
Successful people are passionate about what they do and they have a great
belief in what they do, so they keep persevering. Perseverance is a great
attribute for entrepreneurs. Your take on entrepreneurship? Well, I think the beauty of entrepreneurship is that you have
the opportunity of running your own business, making your own decisions,
succeeding or failing by your own actions. Through my success on the cricket
field, I had a lot of opportunities on the business front. I have had some
successes and I have had some failures. The big thing is to keep persevering,
to keep looking for opportunities, looking for ideas, looking for things you
can get really enthusiastic about. |
||||
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
||||
|
|
Rewards waiting for feedback at |
||||
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
||||
|
|
Disclaimer: We believe that the information contained in this e-zine is true. If you do not wish to receive Smart Trainee please click here. |
||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
||||
|
|
Click here to contact us, if you are unable to view the content properly |
||||
|
|
|
||||
