KL Rahul's U-19 Teammate Who Chose Cornell and Ended Up Changing American Cricket

At the 2010 ICC Under-19 Cricket World Cup in New Zealand, India’s leading wicket-taker was not a name most people would have predicted. The attack was good (Umesh Yadav was in that squad), but the bowler who ran through opposition batting in the most consistent fashion across the tournament was a left-arm medium-fast bowler from Mumbai named Saurabh Netravalkar.

He took nine wickets in six matches at an average of 17.22. His teammates in that squad included KL Rahul, Virat Kohli, Shikhar Dhawan, Rohit Sharma and Ravindra Jadeja.

Most of those names went on to define Indian cricket for the next fifteen years. Saurabh Netravalkar went to Cornell University.

What he built there, and what that choice made possible, is a story about how smart planning opens doors that the obvious path does not.

The Door That Did Not Open

After the Under-19 World Cup, Netravalkar returned to Mumbai with a credible record and the expectation of pushing into Ranji Trophy cricket. He completed his bachelor’s degree in computer engineering while competing at the domestic level.

The problem was the lineup.

Mumbai’s pace attack at that point included Zaheer Khan, Ajit Agarkar, Aavishkar Salvi and Dhawal Kulkarni. Getting into that eleven as a young left-arm medium-fast bowler was not a matter of talent alone. It was a matter of an already-stacked team having no available slot. For several years, Netravalkar trained, bowled, waited and watched the senior team selections without a consistent path in.

He made his peace with this assessment rather than waiting indefinitely for an opportunity that the team’s composition made structurally unlikely.

In 2015, he received an admission offer from Cornell University in New York for a master’s degree in Computer Science. He took it.

What Cornell Meant

Moving to the United States at 25 to study was not a retreat from cricket. It was a rerouting.

At Cornell, Netravalkar began playing cricket again, recreationally at first and then competitively through the American College Cricket programme. Cornell University is listed in the American College Cricket competition records as a participating institution. He played for Cornell while completing his Master’s.

What he found in American cricket was not a lesser version of the game. It was a growing structure with less competition for playing time and no equivalent of Mumbai’s packed pace attack blocking entry. He was a genuinely strong bowler in the American domestic context, and the pathway to the USA national team opened.

In 2018, he made his List A debut for USA. In February 2019, he was appointed USA’s captain in Twenty20 International cricket. He had moved from a situation where the door to the Indian national team was structurally closed to captaining another national team within four years of leaving Mumbai.

The Work Behind the Wickets

Netravalkar’s day job through all of this has been at Oracle.

He joined the technology company after completing his Master’s at Cornell and currently works as a Principal Member of Technical Staff, a senior engineering role. He is on an H-1B work visa. The role is demanding in the way senior software engineering at a major technology company is demanding: high-stakes projects, complex systems, deadlines that do not move for anyone.

He brings his laptop to the stadium. During breaks in matches, he takes work calls and writes code.

This is not a story about someone who chose cricket over a career or a career over cricket. It is a story about someone who found a structure where both could operate in parallel, because he had made a deliberate choice about where to go and what to pursue when the obvious path in one direction was not going to open.

The Super Over

On 6 June 2024, the USA played Pakistan at the T20 World Cup in Dallas.

Pakistan entered the match as one of the tournament favourites. USA was competing in their first-ever T20 World Cup. The match ended in a tie. It went to a Super Over.

Netravalkar bowled the Super Over for USA. Pakistan needed 19 runs off six balls to win. He defended it. He conceded one run. USA won.

His figures for the Super Over: one over, one run, one wicket. One of the most watched moments in American cricket history, delivered by a man who earlier that day had been a software engineer at Oracle and who became a USA international because Mumbai’s pace attack in the early 2010s had no room for another left-arm seamer.

What the Choice Actually Was

The conventional reading of Netravalkar’s story is that he left India because Indian cricket did not want him. That reading is incomplete.

He left India because he identified a set of conditions: graduate education at a strong technical institution, a location where cricket was growing rather than saturated and career opportunities in the field of his undergraduate degree. Together these produced a better outcome than waiting in Mumbai.

He did not give up cricket. He relocated it. He did not give up a career in technology. He built one alongside the sport. The two things ran in parallel because he chose a place where the friction between them was lower than it was at home.

The question his story poses to any young Indian cricketer who is good but not the standout in an already-deep state pool is not “should I go abroad.” It is a more specific question: what does the next five years look like if you stay in the current environment, and what does it look like if you change the environment?

Netravalkar changed the environment. He captained a national team and debugged enterprise software at the same company, in the same decade.