Cricket Academies in India: A Practical Guide

Every Indian city of any size now has cricket academies the way it has tuition centres, and for much the same reason. Parents pay because the queue is enormous and the prize is visible on television every evening. A boy or girl who wants to play seriously will almost certainly pass through one, because the school games period is not enough and the club net is hard to get into without already being good.

The word "academy" covers everything from a single coach with twenty children and one net to a residential institution with physiotherapists and video analysts. The fee range is just as wide. What follows is a guide to the types that exist, the handful with a genuine record, what the money buys, and the questions worth asking before paying — because the industry is largely unregulated and the difference between a good academy and a merely expensive one is not visible from the brochure.

Four kinds of academy, and what each one is actually for

It helps to separate the market into layers, because they do different jobs.

At the bottom, in numbers, are neighbourhood coaching camps: a coach, a ground hired by the hour, morning and evening batches. Most children in organised cricket in India are here. The good ones teach a sound grip, a straight bat and the habit of practice. That is not a small thing, and for a nine-year-old it is the whole job.

Above them sit established private academies attached to a proper ground or gymkhana, running multiple age-group batches, fielding teams in local tournaments and employing coaches with first-class playing or certified coaching backgrounds. This is the layer where a serious teenager should be, because match play against real opposition is where a player actually forms, a point developed in the guide to how club cricket in India is organised.

The third layer is state association infrastructure: district camps, age-group nets and state academies run by the bodies that make up the board, whose place in the system is described in how the BCCI is structured. These are not open commercial products. Entry usually follows performance in association tournaments, and they matter because they sit on the selection ladder rather than beside it.

At the top is the board's own elite facility, which no one can pay to join at all.

Shivaji Park, and what the famous names actually prove

The most famous "academy" in Indian cricket history was barely an institution. Ramakant Achrekar coached schoolboys at Shivaji Park in Dadar, in central Mumbai, with a scooter, a relentless net schedule and a habit of moving his best boys between matches across the city so they batted twice in a day. Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli were his pupils, and Achrekar received the Dronacharya Award, the national honour for coaching. His method was volume: net after net, match after match, against the strongest available opposition.

The lesson of Shivaji Park is not that a great coach guarantees a great player. It is that the ingredients were matches, repetition and hard scrutiny — none of which requires marble changing rooms. When judging a modern academy, that is still the test: how much competitive cricket does a player actually get, and who is watching closely enough to correct them?

The other famous name proves a different point. The MRF Pace Foundation in Chennai was set up in 1987 by the tyre company MRF, with Dennis Lillee brought in to run it. Lillee directed it for a quarter of a century before Glenn McGrath took over as director in 2012. Javagal Srinath, Venkatesh Prasad, Zaheer Khan, Irfan Pathan, Munaf Patel, RP Singh and Sreesanth all trained there, and overseas bowlers including Chaminda Vaas came through its nets. It worked because it was specialised, selective and free to those chosen — a talent filter, not a fee collector. Its place in the wider story of Indian pace is covered in how Indian fast bowling evolved.

The BCCI Centre of Excellence

The board's own facility began life in 2000 as the National Cricket Academy in Bengaluru, working out of the Chinnaswamy Stadium. Rahul Dravid ran its cricket operations before becoming India's head coach, and VVS Laxman took the role after him. In September 2024 the board opened a purpose-built campus on the city's outskirts and renamed the institution the BCCI Centre of Excellence: a site of around forty acres with three full grounds and, by the board's own account, more than eighty pitches across outdoor and indoor facilities, plus sports science, rehabilitation and injury-management departments.

Two things matter for anyone reading academy brochures. First, no private academy is affiliated to it, feeds it or sells access to it, whatever a sales pitch implies. Second, players do not apply. They are called — for age-group skill camps, for rehabilitation from injury, for India A programmes — on the basis of performance in board and association cricket. The Centre of Excellence is the top of the funnel, not a product.

State academies and district camps

Between private coaching and the board's elite campus sit the state associations. Most run an academy or high-performance programme of their own, along with district-level camps that follow the age-group tournament season. Selection into these is through the association's own matches: a strong season in an under-14 or under-16 district tournament typically earns a camp invitation, and the ladder continues upward through the under-19 pathway toward the Ranji Trophy.

This is the layer a private academy should connect to, and the honest question for any academy is exactly that: how many of its players entered district age-group squads in recent seasons? An academy that fields teams in association-recognised tournaments gives its players scorecards that selectors actually see. One that plays only internal matches gives them practice, which is not the same thing.

Registration matters here, and it trips up families who move cities. Age-group cricket is organised by district and state, so a player generally needs to be registered with, and resident in, the association whose tournaments they play. A teenager training in one state while registered in another can find their scores counting for nothing.

What the fee buys, and what it cannot

Fees vary too much by city and level for precise figures to be worth printing, and they change every year. The structure is more stable than the numbers: an admission or kit charge, then a monthly or quarterly fee, rising for smaller batches or one-to-one sessions, with residential programmes in a different price class altogether. Equipment is almost always the family's own expense — the Indian cricket equipment guide covers what is genuinely needed at each age and what is marketing.

What the fee legitimately buys is coaching time, net time, fitness work and match arrangements. What it cannot buy, from any academy at any price, is selection. District and state sides are picked from tournament performance by association selectors. An academy can put a player in front of that machinery; it cannot operate it.

It is also worth saying plainly that there is no central licensing of private cricket academies in India. Anyone may open one. Some excellent institutions and some worthless ones therefore trade under the same word, which is why the checks below matter more than the signboard.

Choosing one: the checks that actually discriminate

A short list of questions separates the serious from the rest quickly.

• Who coaches, and how often are they present? A first-class playing record or a board coaching certification is a reasonable floor. A famous name that visits twice a year is decoration.
• What is the batch size per net? Thirty children to one net means a handful of balls faced per session. Fifteen minutes of focused batting a week develops nobody.
• How much match cricket, and in which tournaments? Association-recognised tournaments are the currency. Ask for the fixture list, not the philosophy.
• Which current district or state age-group players trained here? Names are checkable against published squads. Vague claims about "many state players" are not.
• Is there fitness and injury supervision appropriate to age? Fast bowling workloads for teenagers are a genuine medical subject, not a scheduling detail.
• Does the pitch match the promise? An academy advertising pace bowling development with only matting or cement practice surfaces cannot deliver it.

The red flags

The same warnings recur across cities, and they are worth stating bluntly.

Any academy that promises selection, guarantees a trial with a franchise, or claims a formal pipeline to the IPL is misrepresenting how the game works. Franchise scouts watch open trials and association cricket; the economics of how squads are actually assembled are set out in how the IPL auction works, and no monthly fee changes them. Charging large one-off sums for "selection camps" with visiting celebrities is a related trick.

Be equally wary of academies that encourage age manipulation. The board runs bone-age testing in age-group cricket precisely because overage players in underage tournaments were common, and a player caught out carries the consequence, not the academy that winked at it.

Finally, distrust any establishment that measures progress only in sessions attended rather than in scores made against real opposition. Attendance is the academy's revenue metric, not the player's development metric.

Girls at academies

The economics of women's cricket changed sharply with the board's move to equal international match fees and the arrival of the Women's Premier League, and academy intake has followed. Most established academies now run girls' batches, and state associations run a full parallel structure of women's age-group tournaments through which district and state selection operates, on the same logic as the boys' ladder. The longer arc — from unpaid pioneers to professional contracts — is told in the history of India's women's cricket. For a family choosing an academy for a daughter, the discriminating questions are unchanged, with one addition: whether the academy actually fields girls' teams in association tournaments or merely coaches girls in nets.

Where the academy sits in the whole machine

An academy, even a good one, is one room in a large building. The full structure — school and street cricket at the bottom, clubs and age-group tournaments in the middle, first-class cricket and the national programmes at the top — is mapped in the companion guide to Indian cricket's academies and pathway, and the rest of the country's game sits on the cricket in India hub.

The proportion is the thing to hold onto. India has more registered young cricketers than any country on earth and one national team. An academy's real product, for all but a fraction of its students, is competence, fitness and a lifelong game — which is a perfectly good product, honestly sold. The families who navigate the system best are usually the ones who treat the academy as a training partner and the association tournament scorecard as the only ledger that counts.

Sources and method

This guide draws on the BCCI's public announcements concerning the National Cricket Academy and the Centre of Excellence opened in Bengaluru in 2024, published histories of the MRF Pace Foundation and its directors, and the age-group tournament structures published by the board and its state associations. Fee levels are deliberately described in structural rather than numerical terms because they vary by city and change annually. Nothing here is computed from this site's datasets; the page is descriptive, and where a claim could not be verified against a reliable source it has been left out.