Building Your Own: Starting a Coaching Academy or Sports Business

Every article in this series so far has been about getting hired into something that already exists: a government coaching cadre, a franchise, a federation, a broadcaster. This one is about the fifth option, building the thing yourself, and about two real people who did it without the one advantage most people assume it requires: having been a famous player first.

A coach who played one first-class match

Ramakant Achrekar played precisely one first-class match in his life, for State Bank of India against Hyderabad in 1963. Nobody sought him out as a student because they wanted to be near a famous name. What he built instead, over decades at Shivaji Park in Mumbai, was the Kamath Memorial Cricket Club, run on a simple, deliberately unglamorous rule: anyone could turn up for a trial at the camp, and it was Achrekar’s own judgement, not connections or fees, that decided who got in. Sachin Tendulkar, Vinod Kambli, Ajit Agarkar, Chandrakant Pandit, Ramesh Powar, Pravin Amre and Amol Muzumdar all came up through that same open trial. Achrekar was never a famous player. He became, by 1990, a Dronacharya Award winner, and in 2010, a Padma Shri.

A trainer who never played for India

Ramji Srinivasan followed a different route to the same outcome. He was a state and national-level sprinter, strong at his level, and never competed internationally. His reputation was built entirely on results delivered for other athletes: as the strength and conditioning coach for India’s men’s cricket team during its 2011 World Cup win, then for Chennai Super Kings, working directly with players like Virat Kohli, MS Dhoni and Sachin Tendulkar on their fitness and recovery. That track record, not fame, is what let him later found and run Sports Dynamix, his own performance training centre in Chennai.

What built each of these

Neither man’s business exists because a crowd wanted to learn from someone they already recognised. Each built a different, replicable currency instead: a specific, demonstrated skill, coaching eye in Achrekar’s case, conditioning method in Srinivasan’s, applied to real people over years until the results themselves became the reputation. That takes a place to work from, a willingness to take on whoever is willing to be an early, unproven client and enough time for outcomes to accumulate before there is anything resembling a stable income. What These Paths Pay shows what the grassroots coaching rung, the one this route starts from, realistically pays. Achrekar ran his camp for years before it became the institution it is remembered as. Srinivasan spent years inside India’s cricket setup and at the MRF Pace Foundation before Sports Dynamix existed at all. Nisha Millet’s version, a swimming academy in Bangalore built after time in Perth, is told in She Went to Perth and Came Back.

The real-world equivalent

This is how a private clinical practice, an independent consultancy or a small professional-services business gets built anywhere outside sport too: not by starting with a famous name to trade on, but by doing the underlying work well enough, for long enough, that clients start arriving because of results rather than recognition.