Sai Satya Vijay’s phone has not stopped buzzing since Wednesday evening. The calls arrive every other minute — from friends, family, coaches and even cricketers, among them Shreyanka Patil and Jemimah Rodrigues.
The frenzy has good reason: Vijay’s niece, Uma Kashvi, has become the youngest player ever to be picked in a Women’s Premier League (WPL) auction. The 15-year-old will be on the Delhi Capitals roster after being acquired at her base price of Rs 10 lakh.
“I am in Bilaspur with Kash, alongwith his mother. We are all on cloud nine. I have been crying constantly since she was picked in the auction. People are trying to console me, but these are tears of a dream coming true. It’s a result of a lot of effort,” Vijay tells The Indian Express from Madhya Pradesh, where Kashvi is representing Karnataka in the Women’s U-19 T20 Challenger Trophy.
Kashvi’s journey began when she was seven. The spark was a dream her uncle never had a chance of realising.
“I played inter-district cricket in Andhra, but couldn’t go further because in those days, parents were not supportive of their kids’ cricketing aspirations. But I am still a huge fan of Sachin Tendulkar. Every year on his birthday I cut a cake and pray at a temple. Ever since Kash was a kid, I was determined that she would achieve what I could not,” Vijay says.
The child was enrolled at an academy opposite their home in Bellandur, but Vijay would not stop there. He knew the value of something he himself had lacked — personal supervision.
“My focus was on making her physically fit. In the morning, we used to go for runs. She would complete 3,000 steps. Then from 4 to 6:30 in the evening, she would have her group session at the academy. After that, I would bowl 30 overs of sidearm to her every day. For the first one year, there was not a single day when she did not have a ball mark on her body.
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Uma Kashvi with her uncle. (Special arrangement)
“That is the kind of effort that went into making her the cricketer she is today. But she also accepted everything. She had fallen in love with cricket by that time,” the part-time IT professional recalls.
All-rounder
As Kashvi works her way through the congratulatory messages, among them one from her new captain and idol Jemimah that reads ‘Welcome home’, her ecstatic mother – a SAP lead at a corporate entity – conveys the news to her father.
He’s a vice-president at an IT firm. Academics ruled the roost in the household, but it was never a deterrent for the teenager.
“Kash doesn’t go to school but has scored 90 percent throughout her academic career so far. She demands the highest standards from herself even in studies. She simply won’t accept low grades, she gets very unhappy if her marks go down,” the proud uncle claims.
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When Kashvi was 13, Vijay took her to coach Arjun Dev’s New Innings Cricket Enterprise — the academy that shaped Shreyanka. It took only a few sessions for Dev to see that her talent belied her age.
“It was clear that she was way beyond her years in terms of maturity and understanding of the game. She knows how to play cricket, she knows how to win games. So it was almost a challenge for us to make her unlearn that. But she would always find a way to win. That was her standout quality.” Dev tells this masthead.
The coach believes that watching Shreyanka’s ascent from close quarters only increased Kashvi’s hunger to shine.
“In a way, seeing someone close who has made it to the next level makes you feel like, ‘Okay, I’m almost there’, or ‘I can do this to get there’. She is quite close to Shreyanka, she has had many conversations with her. Shrey is also super-happy that Kash is now in the WPL.”
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Vijay left his full-time IT job to give more attention to his niece’s cricket development. Today, it all makes sense.
“Vaibhav Sooryavanshi was the youngest to be picked at an IPL auction, and Uma Kashvi is the youngest to be picked at a WPL auction. Today, she entered the record books,” he signs off.
