August 1997, Colombo. A 24-year-old boy from Dombivli stood at the top of his run-up, six feet four inches of nerves stretching toward the sky. He had not even been supposed to bowl this over. Rajesh Chauhan and Anil Kumble were the men in charge. But fate had something else in store for this bowler.
No warm-up, no plan, just the desperate prayer: don’t embarrass yourself. He stretched his arms twice, ran in and did what every bowler dreams of. The ball left his hand before his mind could catch up.
The ball caught Marvan Atapattu’s edge, flew to Nayan Mongia’s hands, and cricket history belonged to him. First ball wicket in Test cricket. The only Indian ever.
That should have been the beginning of everything. Instead, it became a story Nilesh Kulkarni would tell thousands of students years later about how life never unfolds the way you draw it in your notebook.
Debut that became a masterclass in humility
Sanath Jayasuriya and Roshan Mahanama did not care about Kulkarni’s fairytale start. They were building their own monument. By the time Kulkarni walked back to his room after the 3rd day’s play, the scoreboard read something that made his stomach turn. Then it got worse.
The partnership grew to 576 runs. Sri Lanka’s total climbed to 952 for 6 declared. Kulkarni sent down 69.5 more overs across three days, running on a baking Colombo track, searching for angles, varying his flight, trying everything he knew from his Mumbai cricket upbringing.
Nothing worked.
That first ball remained his only wicket in the innings. The match became famous for Sri Lanka’s records, not India’s new left-arm spinner.
Nilesh would play only two more Tests. Four years passed before he took another wicket at that level. In March 2001, at Chennai, he dismissed Matthew Hayden. That was it. His final Test wicket. His spin partner Harbhajan Singh took fifteen wickets in that same match and became a national hero. Kulkarni flew back to domestic cricket, back to the grind he knew better than anyone.
The real cricket happened in Mumbai’s nets
357 first-class wickets at an average of 24.89.
24 five-wicket hauls.
3 ten-wicket hauls.
These numbers do not come from luck. They come from a culture.
Kulkarni grew up in the Mumbai cricket system of the 1990s, where a bowler’s job description was simple: get five wickets every innings or find another profession.
The city’s cricket factories ran on pure hunger. Practice meant taking more than two hundred catches every single day. In one full season, Mumbai dropped only one catch. The batsmen – Sachin Tendulkar, Sanjay Manjrekar, Vinod Kambli – carried the runs. The bowlers carried the responsibility of taking twenty wickets.
“My job was to win matches,” Kulkarni says flatly. “Not to participate. To win.”
The tall boy who had shot up eight inches after picking spin over fast bowling learned to use his height to create bounce. The skinny teenager who chose left-arm spin because he did not have the bulk for pace bowling learned to flight the ball above the batsman’s eyeline. Mumbai cricket taught him that preparation was not about bowling forty balls in a net and resting. It was about bowling from start to end, ball after ball, building the patience to run through a side.
He remembers speaking to Muttiah Muralitharan once. The Sri Lankan legend told him he worked on his doosra for two years before using it in international cricket. Two years for one delivery. That conversation stayed with Kulkarni. Overnight success, he understood, was a lie told to people who did not play sport.
The IPL moment that changed everything
Kulkarni was retiring from first-class cricket. He did not get an IPL contract. Lalit Modi‘s league was exploding across India, but the former India player was not part of the party. One evening, he and his wife Rasika went to watch a match at DY Patil Stadium. What he saw made him stop.
White faces everywhere. British professionals running the show. One hundred and fifty experts flown in from overseas to manage India’s biggest cricket property. In a country of 1.2 billion people, nobody had trained two hundred sports managers.
“That was the gap,” Kulkarni says. “We had created an annual sporting property but had nobody to run it.”
The anger became an idea. The idea became an obsession. For a year and a half, Kulkarni travelled across India and abroad, collecting information, compiling content, building a curriculum from scratch. All the existing sports management material was foreign. Nothing had Indian context. No understanding of local federations, government systems, the messy reality of Indian sport.
Building a new pitch: The IISM story
Starting International Institute of Sports Management (IISM) was a gamble.
In India, parents wanted their kids to be doctors or engineers. Telling a middle class father that his son wanted to be a “sports manager” was like telling him the boy wanted to join the circus. Nilesh had to convince the world that education in sports was a serious business.
In 2010, he launched IISM. It started as a conversation in his living room. It grew into India’s first real answer to the question: who will run our sports?
IISM was not built as a fancy idea. It was built as a response to absence. There was no Indianised sports education content. No structured pathways. No bridge between sport and employment.
He brought in Professor Ratnakar Shetty, a legendary cricket administrator, as an advisor. Shetty told him plainly that education is a big responsibility and he had to give it more than 100 percent because students’ futures were in his hands. That weight of responsibility shaped IISM. They partnered with Mumbai University to offer the first proper Bachelor’s degree in Sports Management in the country.
The curriculum was designed to create what Nilesh calls “Day One Business Ready Managers”. These were not just fans. They were professionals trained in sports data analytics, marketing, and venue management.
Then things moved.
The University of Mumbai accepted sports management as a degree. The Government of India approved a formal nomenclature for sports education. A system began forming.
Ledger and the growth
Here’s what the numbers actually say about Nilesh’s business trajectory: His main company, Eduhub Education Private Limited, pulled in 18.9 crore rupees by the end of the 2024 fiscal year. In a niche education market, that’s genuine momentum; not vanity metrics.
He has built more than just one company though. The whole operation spans several entities:
Eduhub Sports Private Limited runs the sports and recreation side of things.
Yashvir Events Private Limited handles business services and event management.
Vruha Education and Sports Private Limited: A new venture started in early 2025 in Chhattisgarh, showing his plan to take sports education beyond the big cities.
Put it all together and you see the pattern; Nilesh isn’t just an educator with a passion project. He has got a clear eye for the financial side and plays it strategically.
Winning the national cap again
In 2020, Nilesh received an honor that felt as big as playing for India. The President of India gave IISM the Rashtriya Khel Protsahan Puruskar. It was the first time a sports management institute was recognized at such a high national level. For Nilesh, this was the ultimate validation. It moved his work from being a private venture to a national mission.
His influence now goes beyond the classroom. He is a member of major bodies like the CII’s SPORTSCOM Industry Confederation and works with the government on projects like Khelo India. His students even helped create the operating manuals for the Khelo India University Games.
The Jerry Maguire dream
Nilesh often talks about wanting his students to be the “Jerry Maguires” of India. He wants them to represent Indian sports on the global stage with heart and professional skill. This dream has led to some high profile partnerships. IISM has collaborated with Liverpool FC for research on fan engagement and worked with Victoria University in Australia on sports science.
But at the heart of it, Nilesh remains the boy from Dombivli who understands the grind. He knows that most athletes retire at 35, which is too young to stop working. By building these businesses, he has given himself and thousands of others a second innings. Whether it is producing a National Anthem video with legends like Sachin Tendulkar or helping IIM Mumbai start new programs, he is always looking for the next gap to fill.
Building a team without twenty wickets
Running an education institute, Kulkarni discovered, was not so different from leading a bowling attack. You set higher goals than you can reach. You learn from failure. You never give up.
But Kulkarni’s real classroom is the wall inside the college where he has painted his core belief: “If you know your strength, that’s your asset. If you know your weakness, that’s your strength.”
He tells his six hundred students this story. About the boy from Dombivili who took a wicket with his first ball and then learned more from the next sixty-nine point five overs that gave him nothing. About the spinner who waited four years for his second Test wicket and finally understood that the game owes you nothing. About the cricketer who built an education empire because he failed to get an IPL contract.
“The only thing cricket taught me that I use every day is this,” he says, leaning forward. “Do not be afraid of failure. Dr Kalam said fail means First Attempt In Learning. Why run away from it?”
The body grows old, the mind does not
At fifty two, Kulkarni still looks like he could bowl ten overs on a hot afternoon. He jogs twice a week. Does yoga. Walks briskly. The old habits from Mumbai’s nets do not die. The body stays fit because the mind needs to stay fresh for the three hundred students who pass through IISM every year, each wanting to become something Indian sport never had before.
“Be hungry,” he tells them. “Three wickets should make you want five. Five should make you want seven. Never be content.”
It is the same lesson Mumbai cricket taught him when he was a skinny boy who chose spin because he was too thin for pace. The same lesson Colombo taught him when records tumbled around him and he kept bowling. The same lesson that drives him to build sports education in a country that finally has fifteen annual sporting properties but needs thousands of professionals to run them.
Closing
Nilesh Kulkarni will always be remembered for that first ball. Google makes sure of it.
But his real contribution came after the last ball he bowled.
The boy who took a wicket with his first ball in Test cricket never became a regular for India. But the man who learned from those seventy empty overs built something bigger. He built a pipeline for Indian sport’s future.
On some evenings, when the IISM corridors are quiet, Kulkarni walks past the classrooms where students study sports law and marketing. He passes the wall with his quote about weakness and strength. He stops at the trophy cabinet where the President’s award gleams under yellow light.
69.5 overs of effort. 0 wickets. One lifetime of learning.