Coach Bhati has trained over 40 boys and girls in five years. Cricket is his full-time living—sessions, fitness, tactics, and late-night video analysis. “Girls now see cricket as a legitimate career, not a distant dream,” he says, adding, “Families are ready to invest, and young women are beginning to dominate trials, state camps, and academy leagues.”
He rattles off examples: a 12-year-old leggie with metronomic control, a left-handed opener with three fifties in four games—all stories that would have been outliers a decade ago. Almost everyone points to the same inflection point: India’s women lifting the World Cup.
“Ever since that win, every week a new girl walks in saying she wants to bowl like Renuka Singh or hit like Smriti Mandhana,” adds Anju.
Across the country, the effect has been electric. Haryana academies now report more girls than boys in off-season camps, Mumbai tournaments host all-girls divisions, and a tribal village in Assam built its own makeshift pitch after watching their state captain on TV.
If the rise of local cricket built the foundation of a grassroots economy, it was technology that turned a scattered hobby into an organised, data-driven sports industry.
At the center of this shift stands CricHeroes—the platform that changed how India watches, plays, records, and even recruits local cricket talent. It began with one simple question: What if every ball bowled in a dusty ground could be recorded like a professional match?
For founder Abhishek Desai, it wasn’t a tech problem—it was visibility. “Grassroots cricket had no memory,” he said. “Thousands of brilliant performances disappear the moment the match ended.” A survey in Ahmedabad noted nearly 70 per cent of matches were still being scored on paper, leaving talent undocumented.
By 2016, Desai had mapped the market, raised seed funding, and launched the CricHeroes app, kicking off a digital scoring revolution. The core platform remains free for players and scorers, while CricInsights and pro dashboards run on subscriptions. Organisers pay for branding, analytics, streaming, and promotional slots.
“We wanted to empower every player,” says Desai, “and for organisers who wanted a professional edge, we provided the full commercial suite.” Digitising every ball gave amateur players something they never had. “We didn’t just make an app. We created identity,” he adds. “A boy in a small ground suddenly had statistics, rankings, followers, and recognition.”
Today the numbers are staggering: 4.2 crore players, 1.4 crore matches, 8.7 lakh tournaments.
CricHeroes is trusted by state associations, ICC bodies, academy leagues, community tournaments and even small neighbourhood organisers who now run micro-IPL formats with auctions, payments, and sponsors.
A new economy formed around it. Scorers get steady bookings. Umpires get work. Commentators build followings. Sponsors move from cloth banners to digital scoreboards and streaming windows. As Desai puts it, “Grassroots cricket is no longer a hobby. It is a full-scale industry.”
