Coaching After Your Playing Career: How Domestic-Level Players Get There

Rajkumar Sharma played 9 first-class matches for Delhi between 1986 and 1991. He scored 46 runs in total, at an average of 23. By any measure of playing talent, this was a modest career.

In 2016, Rajkumar Sharma won the Dronacharya Award, India’s highest government honour for a sports coach. By then he had built the West Delhi Cricket Academy from nothing and coached a 9-year-old named Virat Kohli through his club years. He later became head coach of the Delhi Ranji team.

This is the shape of coaching as a route back into sport, one of the four routes covered in the previous article in this series. It rewards years of teaching and a real academy built up one batch of students at a time more than it rewards how far you got as a player yourself.

The actual entry point

The certification most coaching jobs eventually ask for comes from the Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports (NSNIS) at Patiala, still widely known by its older name, NIS. NSNIS runs two relevant courses: a six-week Certificate Course in Sports Coaching and a longer Diploma in Sports Coaching. LNIPE Gwalior, the deemed university built entirely around sport, runs coaching diplomas too.

The eligibility for both is reachable for a domestic-level player, not built around international achievement. The diploma asks for a 10+2 education and a top-3 finish at an inter-school, district or inter-college championship. The certificate course asks for 10+2 and participation at university level. Selection after that runs on academic merit and an interview.

State sports associations and Sports Authority of India (SAI) centres also run shorter coaching camps of their own. For many coaches, one of those is the first real credential they use, well before attempting the full NSNIS diploma.

Two paths, not one

Surinder Mahajan topped his NIS coaching batch in 1978-79, then spent 26 years with SAI and the Chandigarh sports department. During that time he trained junior players, including Saina Nehwal and P.V. Sindhu, at camp level, well before either became famous. After retiring from government service, he opened his own academy in Zirakpur.

Rajkumar Sharma took the private route. He built an academy first and earned his reputation through the players he produced there, most of all Kohli. The official domestic coaching role with Delhi came later, once that reputation already existed.

Both are current routes. One starts inside the government system and moves outward. The other starts private and earns its way into official recognition. Neither depends on having been a star player.

What it takes

Coaching is not a quick pivot. Both Mahajan and Sharma spent decades at it before reaching the roles they are known for now. The early years of either path usually mean coaching children and beginners, not elite athletes, and the income during that period is rarely steady. Nobody arrives at a Ranji-level coaching job in the first year.

This is the cost of the most open of the four routes back into sport. It asks for patience and years more than it asks for money or connections, which is a real trade.