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  Date: 6^th June 2010

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Entrepreneurship within - 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.

Article was earlier published in one of the reputed Business magazine.

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