There is a moment that Pratham — BTech ITDS, four years at ADYPU — describes from the team bus after the AIU. They had just lost. The match was over, the tournament was done, and every player on that bus had given everything they had over months of preparation. And instead of silence, instead of retreating into headphones and separate corners, the team sat together. Talked. Processed it as one.
“We lost,” he says, “but we lived that moment. That was important.”
That sentence captures something about ADYPU cricket that scoreboards cannot. This is a programme built on people — on seniors who stayed late to teach juniors, on a coach who waited if practice sessions ran behind schedule, on a first-year student who bowled for the first time and got selected not because his numbers were brilliant but because his team believed in him. What has been built here, quietly, across grounds and practice sessions and long bus rides home, is a cricket culture that is genuinely worth writing about.
Starting from Scratch, Building Something Real
Ask any of the players when ADYPU cricket really began to feel like a team, and the answers converge around the same idea: not when the wins came, but when the group stopped being individuals.
Raj, playing aeronautical engineering since his first year, puts it simply: the practice sessions were fun. Not just productive — fun. That distinction matters because fun is what keeps people showing up when results are not going their way. Aditya, who joined the team in his third year of BTech CTIS, echoes the same thing — improved skills, new friendships, organised events as both a volunteer and participant. The team gave him a structure and a community that his academic programme alone could not have.
Zeeshan, from hotel management, bowled in competitive cricket for the first time at ADYPU. He did not expect to get selected. He was not the most technically polished player on the ground. But his teammates backed him, his captains — Omkar and Divyansh — trusted him even when internships pulled him away from practice, and Coach Sagar Apte held space for him in the squad. He became, by his own admission, the most mischievous member of the group — the one whose energy kept morale up when results were hard to find. Teams need that person. Every dressing room does.
“We focused on team bonding rather than winning or losing. We all support each other — that was the foundation.”
The Culture Between Seniors and Juniors
One of the more remarkable things about ADYPU’s cricket programme is what happens between years. Divyansh, a BBA first-year who came in as captain, faced a challenge that would unsettle most people his age: how do you direct seniors when you are the newest person in the room? The answer, as it turned out, was that it was not really a challenge at all. Nobody minded. Everyone cooperated. The hierarchy of the year did not override the shared purpose of the team.
Manikanth, a first-year BCA Cyber Security student, describes watching the seniors practise on the ground and simply asking if he could join. He went through trials, got into the squad, played matches and events — and found that the gap between juniors and seniors felt almost invisible. “It felt like there was no difference,” he says. Seniors taught. Juniors listened and then pushed back. The team grew.
The moment that stays with Manikanth happened after the AIU, on the way back from the tournament. He had been benched for the match. Zeeshan, his senior, came and sat with him. He did not offer empty reassurance. Instead, he told him exactly where he could improve, why he was not in the top eleven yet, and that he would always be available to help him get there. That is not something you can put in a curriculum. That is culture.
Coach Sagar Apte: The Infrastructure Behind the Team
Behind every one of these stories is Coach Sagar Apte — who joined ADYPU in November 2024 and, in the months since, has built a sports programme that now sends fourteen teams to AIU tournaments across disciplines. For cricket specifically, his contribution has been total.
Practice was structured around the realities of university life: morning sessions when evening lectures clashed, four days of skill training and three days of conditioning and recovery, core exercises and running drills built into the weekly rhythm. When players needed attendance support for tournament travel, Sagar arranged letters and emails to teachers and deans. When equipment was short — nets, balls, kit — he sourced it. When a student was late to practice, he waited.
The team also hosted intercollege events on campus — football and cricket tournaments that brought teams from outside ADYPU in, including one organised as a tribute to a student who had passed away. Handling permissions, coordinating logistics, making the events happen — all of it required institutional support that Sagar helped navigate.
“Sagar used to wait if we got late for practice. He brought tournament information. He arranged everything — we just had to focus on the game.”
Tournaments, Results, and What They Mean
The ADYPU cricket team has competed across a significant circuit in a short time. The AIU West Zone tournament took them to Rajkot — the highest level of inter-university competition in the country, divided by zones, contested by the best institutional sides in the region. The MIT Vishwanath Sports Meet saw them play three matches, winning one and losing two by close margins. And in April, at the MIT inter-college meet, ADYPU’s boys became champions.
The MIT final is worth pausing on. It was a match that was slipping away. The team was chasing or defending a target without its best bowlers available in the final stretch. Pratham and Zeeshan, the seniors, held the innings together. They did not win with ease — they scrapped, adjusted, and found a way. It was the kind of win that means more than a trophy because everyone in the dressing room knew exactly how close it had been.
But it is Pratham’s account of the AIU bus ride — the loss, the quiet, the choice to sit together and talk it through — that most accurately describes what ADYPU cricket has become. A team that sat for twenty minutes after every tough game and asked what could have been better. Not to assign blame. Not to spiral. But to learn, together, and walk out with their heads up.
That is not something most cricket programmes manage in four years. ADYPU has managed it in one.