TN Wicket Keeper from the 1988 Ranji and Irani Trophy winning team has turned an Entrepreneur and is targeting sportspeople worldwide with a mental resilience app
D Girish, the TN wicket keeper who was part of the Ranji Trophy and Irani Trophy winning team in 1988, has turned an Entrepreneur at 58 and has launched a ‘mental health’ app for sportspersons. The app will go live next month with 200 players from the TNCA. Girish, who is currently the Chairman of the Cricket Advisory Committee (he replaced S Suresh), that appointed the new TN coach and the state selectors, is all excited at the prospects of this first of its kind offering in the cricket space. His team mate from the University days and later VP at Microsoft, Sanjay Partharasathy and former India cricketer K Srikkanth’s brother and childhood friend Srinath have invested in this startup venture.
He is so pepped up that he forgets his Sunday lunch as he gets talking passionately to this writer about this new initiative that seeks to take care of the mental challenges of cricketers helping them understand and evaluate their mental side better.
The First Big Cricketing Moment with Coach Audi Chetty
Girish’s drew his first inspiration in cricket from his two uncles in Bangalore who played Junior State cricket in Karnataka. When he was not yet 10, he began playing cork ball cricket at the then famous Corporation ground in Nungambakkam. He recounts the first big moment in his cricketing life when the revered Audi Chetty who later went on to coach Udumalpet's SVPB into a successful club “Audi Chetty was PSBB’s coach in the mid 1970s and he turned up at the corporation ground where the school team practiced. I was tense when I saw an old man looking at me closely and wondered as to what he would say of my batting.”
“Much to my delight, he asked me to come to the school nets the next day. When I said I had to ask my parents, he came home and did the ‘convincing’ talk for me and that landed me at the school nets. It was a great gesture from one of the most well respected coaches in city cricket. There was no looking back since and I had a great cricketing phase at PSBB with the school doing exceptionally well in cricket.”
Girish has the highest words of praise for Audi Chetty in shaping his cricketing career “Audi Chetty always kept in simple. He taught me all the basics that I still remember almost five decades later. He was instrumental in spotting and nurturing me and gave me all the confidence that I needed in cricket in the starting phase.”
Accidental Keeper -Audi Chetty again!!!
Girish started off as a batting all-rounder who bowled a bit of off spin. He recalls the moment that led to him becoming a keeper “I would do everything at the school nets. That day I was keeping wickets. It so happened that the regular keeper turned sick and Audi Chetty seeing me keep asked me to do the same in the match. From that moment I became a keeper.”
Girish counts that as an important moment in his life “As a keeper I had to watch every ball closely including the bowler’s grip and release. This helped me watched the ball closely as a batsman as well and I began to concentrate better while batting. And it helped me played the long innings.”
While he began to do well in cricket, academics was always top priority. Once when he got a lower rank, Mrs. YGP, who would personally hand out the report card, remarked “Not You Girish”.
A Great Cricketing year followed by Disillusionment
As a 14year old, he played for TN U16 under CS Suresh Kumar (https://prtraveller.blogspot.com/2022/07/cs-suresh-kumar-india-schools-tn-opener.html). His performances there earned him a place in the South Zone team as the first wicket keeper ahead of Sadanand Viswanath. After a standout knock in the Zone match in Lucknow, he was chosen for the National camp in Bombay with the team going on a trip to Pakistan in 1979-80. It was in that phase that he had his first disillusionment with cricket something that in some ways almost four decades later has led him to develop a mental health app for cricketers.
Some age related issues led to a re-selection and another camp was held at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore. Much to his dismay, he was not offered the batting opportunity at the camp and Sadanand Viswanath, who later went on to play for India and emerged a star in the WCC 1985, was chosen ahead of him. Girish had scored lots of runs in junior cricket that year both for the state and zone and had also kept wickets well. It had been his best year in cricket “If I had been picked for that tour, my cricket may have taken a completely different turn”, he says looking back at the series of events in 1979-80.
This had a lasting impact on him as a teenager on the unexpected twists life has in store. Four Decades later he is keen that every young cricketer is taken care and given a fair deal.
Fully Engaged with Cricket but still high marks in XII Board
Into his mid teens, he was already in the U19, U 22 and U25 state teams and his constant absence during the year led the Principal at St Bedes (he had moved to state board in Class XI) to withhold his hall ticket and it required his appa’s intervention to secure permission to sit for the exams. And when the results were out, everyone in the school management were in for a big surprise “It was my PD who went in to check my marks and he came back in a shocked state asking how I had achieved this for I had not attended the regular classes at all that year and yet secured 92%.”
Lets go a big Cricketing opportunity
He was selected for the Indian U19 trip to West Indies close to the Boards but he chose academics over cricket and skipped that tour. He justifies that decision saying that 'cricket is always uncertain' and 'you do not know when you will fall from the cliff.'
The Best years in Cricket under Venkat
He played six years of league cricket (MCC and India Pistons) in the 1980s under legendary S Venkataraghavan (https://prtraveller.blogspot.com/2020/04/venkataraghavan75.html), who recently hosted a birthday party at the MCC for some of his old teammates from the 1970s and 80s, and considers it the best learning years in cricket “Venkat had gone through severe challenges at zonal and national levels but always remained tough and strong. He initiated in me ways of facing life and its twists and turns. He wanted me to succeed in the toughest of circumstances and prepared me for that."
"Once when a ball from him bounced high and hit my face (my cheek swelled beyond recognition), he came up to me and said this is nothing just continuing keeping. I could not even place ice on the swollen area. It strengthened my mental space and I became tougher and more resolute on the field. It also laid the foundation to face all the challenges that life threw at you and to face it with a sense of confidence.”
He recalls the glorious years playing under Venkataraghavan “It was my biggest exposure in cricket and life and I am grateful for that. Keeping to Venkat for six years was a great learning experience, not just in cricket but for the life that was ahead of me. He helped me raise the bar and taught me toughness. It was from him that I learned never to get bogged down by failures.”
The University Days
Girish says that Venkat was kind enough to hand out a personally written recommendation letter to the Anna University on his cricketing and academic credentials and his personality. He joined Anna University where he TVS' Sanjay Parthasarathy was a batchmate and cricket teammate. He played non stop cricket in that phase, one when he was also part of the Ranji camp. But like at School, here too it was a big challenge “I had begun playing first division cricket and after the matches over the weekend, I had to be at the class at 8.30am when the body was tired and the mind was still recounting incidents from the weekend’s match. The problem with cricket is that it suddenly makes you a hero and it was easy for a teenager to fall prey to the praises from your friends and college mates. Success in cricket led to youngsters getting carried away easily.”
Great Time batting with TE
At India Pistons, TE Srinivasan shaped his batting technique with some simple tips “When I was struggling against off spin, he asked me to move my guard from leg stump to middle stump. And suddenly I began middling the ball. On another occasion, when I refused a leg bye after the ball hit my thigh pad, he came up to me and said ‘always a single off the thigh pad’. It was great batting lesson playing with TE as I imbibed the finer aspects from him.”
In his first year at college, he shared a big record breaking double century stand in the Vizzy Trophy against East Zone with PC Prakash (https://prtraveller.blogspot.com/2022/04/pc-prakash-tn-ranji-1980s.html), whose sister he was to marry later that decade when she was just 19!!!! 'It's all in the game' says a chuckling Girish. That phase also turned out to be Girish's two best years in Ranji cricket.
Even after a great batting season for MCC, he did not make it into the playing XI in Ranji that once again left him a bit disappointed and it was only veteran Bharath Reddy’s injury that led to his Ranji debut.
Vasudevan - A Shrewd Captain
After six years under Venkat, Girish moved to SPIC where he played under the Ranji Trophy winning captain S Vasudevan (https://prtraveller.blogspot.com/2020/06/vasudevan-tn-ranji-trophy-retirement.html). He played two full seasons of Ranji Cricket before a severe back injury brought about a premature end to his playing career. While Venkat was a toughie, he calls Vasudevan as a soft spoken but shrewd captain “Vasu was very different from Venkat. While he was soft spoken, he was a very shrewd captain. He understood the match situations well and knew exactly the right field settings for every batsman. He was fair to everyone and every player in the team trusted him for that. Under him, there was no politics or groupism. He brought unity among the players and everyone enjoyed their cricket that season. He brought the best out of everyone”
Girish in the role of CAC Chairman
It was that great respect for his ‘captain’ that led him to have an open conversation with him earlier this year when Girish had to take the big call to sack the TN Selection committee and appoint a new one in another effort to win the coveted Ranji Trophy (Vasudevan led Selection committee has made way for a new committee led by UR Radhakrishnan). As he has always been throughout his career, Girish had a straight talk with Vasudevan reasoning out the thought process for the change.
On the Selection committee, he says he has had a word with the new committee asking them to be fair to the boys. “No cricketer should feel that he was deprived of a fair opportunity.” He has known UR Radhakrishnan (https://prtraveller.blogspot.com/2018/03/ur-radhakrishnan.html) for over three decades and is confident that he will be a ‘straight talker’.
Give Kulkarni time to turnaround the TN fortunes
He is also of the view that the new TN coach Sulakshan Kulkarni will need to be given 2-3 years as nothing can turnaround just like that. But he is happy in the way Kulkarni has shaped up in the first few months “His contract starts only from June but he has been here from March watching the first division league matches and the camps that we have held. He has been able to spot players who previously were nowhere in the picture.”
Premature End to his playing days
Back injury dealt a serious blow to Girish's cricket and instead of taking to a surgery, he decided to end his cricket early, probably soon than one would have expected. He counts winning the Ranji and the Irani Trophy in the same year as his big cricketing moments. He particularly remembers the belting that VBC (https://prtraveller.blogspot.com/2016/01/vb-chandrasekar.html) handed out to Hirwani and Gopal Sharma as one of the most memorable innings he had seen during his playing days.
A Mental Resilience app for cricketers
Despite the performances on the cricket field- he played 16 matches for TN, the incident in Bangalore remained at the back of his mind and he understood early on that a cricketer’s life was always unsteady and that they could fall any moment. Just over four decades later, he is now launching an app to test the mental health of cricketers and help them keep their anxiety under control.
"The pandemic phase got me thinking at home. I found that the players were lost in their own thoughts. There was very little communication with them. There is always an anxiety within players and most are at wits end in expressing their mental challenges and sorting those out."
Girish says he spoke to a number of sports psychologists on this and most of them suggested counselling sessions as a solution. But he was not convinced. He interviewed several cricketers and found that there was a stigma attached to sharing the psychological challenges. In many of them, they were not even aware of the role of the mind in a success or failure. And that feedback led him to launch a mental health self help app- Equilii- and he convinced the RCB psychologist Sanjana Kiran to be part of this exercise.
Equilii, he says, is a digitized mental resilience enhancement app, that makes sportspeople self-reliant, through self-awareness and mind skills training and facilitates peak performance. Through the app, he is looking to provide a comprehensive model of mental care for cricketers and players in other sports as well.
"During my playing days, there was not much focus on physical training and fitness. While the physical fitness aspects has caught on in the last couple of decades, the importance of the mental aspects in sport has not been given its due importance. Mental well being is an aspect that should get just as much importance as physical training and from the early years of a sports person," says Girish.
He has listed a number of parameters on which the players will be tested and analysed. The app offers psycho education and has an emotion tracker.
Girish is delighted two of his old teammates have placed their trust on him in this venture by investing. He says that Krishnamachari Srinath was a great childhood friend and a genuine guy. The two of them played together at the U19 level and for MCC in the first division.
There has been positive feedback from Sanjay Parthasarathy (https://prtraveller.blogspot.com/2023/04/sanjay-parthasarathy-south-zone-u19.html) and he is likely to invest further in the venture. It is also likely that Girish will go for first round external funding in the near future as he looks to expand his presence into overseas markets like the Middle East and the US. He says that he sees US as a big market for his app in the future.
Signs up the first deal with the TNCA
The TNCA has just signed up with him for 200 players and he is in talks with the Super Kings Academy to install the app among the students there. Head Coach of SKA Sriram Krishnamurthy who for a long time has been a strong believer on the importance of shaping the mental side of young players and who has been a High Performance Coach for a decade in Australia, England and New Zealand told this writer last month that he found the app interesting and believed that it could play a critical role in helping youngsters understand themselves better.
Girish is also in talks with other cricket associations to take the mental resilience app to its players there. Interestingly the app has found interest in the athletic space with Meghanatha Reddy of SDAT keen to implement this with the athletes there. He is also in talks with Gopichand Academy to take this app into the Badminton players.
Entrepreneurial Excitement at 59
Even as a youngster he had wanted to become an entrepreneur but hailing from a typical middle class family and having married early (at 23!!!), he had to have a secure salary and thus worked at SPIC and HCL for close to two decades. It is not an age when one would expect a typical Madhwa to venture into a sports startup but D Girish, now 59, has always been passionate about cricket and believes that not much attention has been placed on the mental aspect of young cricketers. With this app, he is hoping to fill that gap.
While one part of Girish will focus on doing everything as the Chairman of CAC to help TN lift the Ranji Trophy, this passionate entrepreneurial side will see him spend just as much time on helping aspiring cricketers take care of their mental health. He is looking to play this entrepreneurial role with just the same intensity as he did when he was a player.
This section will track the progress he makes on this front.