Oracle developer compiles rich experiences as a leader of US cricket team

The crowd at the Dallas cricket grounds was roaring. In the finals of the Men’s T20 World Cup in June, the upstart United States national team had forced Pakistan’s national team into overtime. After scoring 18 runs during their turn at bat in the super over, as cricket overtimes are called, the US turned to fast bowler Saurabh Netravalkar to limit Pakistan’s batsmen for one final time. If he could hold them to fewer than 18 runs out of six deliveries, the upset would be complete.

It was a long road back for Netravalkar—from the glory of 2010, when he starred for India’s under-19 team, to an unfulfilling stint with India’s senior team until, finally, this chance at redemption.

Just before taking the pitch, Netravalkar turned to his roommate, fellow US national team bowler Nosthush Kenjige, and said: “These are the dreams you want to live. This is meant to be.”

“He had that belief,” Kenjige says, “and he had that confidence.”

No stranger to pressure

In many ways, Netravalkar was the obvious choice to close out the game.

A bowler, like a pitcher in baseball, holds his team’s fortunes in his hands. No action can begin without him, and Netravalkar was picked to close this victory because of his uncanny ability to place his bowls exactly where they need to be. As a left-handed fast bowler—who has taken the most wickets of any bowler in US major league cricket history—he is also crafty enough to induce batters to hit toward the longer side of the pitch.

“Not everybody can do that,” Kenjige says. “Every time we’ve been in trouble as a team in the last four or five years, he’s been the guy to go to. It was a no-brainer to put him in there.”

When Pakistan failed to hit a six (the cricket equivalent of a home run) off Netravalkar’s last bowl to tie the super over, his teammates collapsed in a happy scrum around him, shouting for joy.

And if the game situation wasn’t pressure enough, Netravalkar’s wife, whom he met while studying at Cornell University, was about to give birth to their first child, a daughter. “Obviously, there was a bit of anxiety there,” he laughs.

A disciplined approach to cricket… and life

It was under Netravalkar’s leadership that the US national team was able to achieve the necessary ranking to play One-Day International (ODI) and Twenty20 International (T20I) tournaments that have propelled the team into the top 20 of the world cricket rankings. It also allowed the team to play together more often than just a few times a year, which has led to greater team professionalism and elevated the status of US cricket overall. “He was the mainstay. You could say he’s the founding captain of the USA cricket team,” Kenjige says.

Netravalkar gave up the captaincy of the US national team in 2021 to devote himself more fully to improving his bowling. He was the first team member to pore over game film to study his performance, and he then shares his observations with teammates to help them improve their games. “He has a very good process, and he’s process oriented,” Kenjige notes. “He also has such a good, disciplined lifestyle outside of cricket, which helps him in cricket as well.”

Indeed, Netravalkar rises at 5:00 every morning and does an hour and half of yoga every day, even on match days. He chalks up his success in pressure-packed situations to a disciplined approach. “Especially at the top levels, every moment is high pressure and high stakes,” he says. “So I’m always trying to simplify things down to what are the one or two things I need to really nail in order to give myself the best chance of succeeding.”

A familiar game on unfamiliar turf

As the best wicket taker for India at the 2010 Under-19 World Cup, Netravalkar should have been on the fast track to superstardom in that cricket-crazy country. But because India didn’t win the under-19s that year, the team’s players were largely forgotten. Netravalkar gave himself two years to crack the roster of the senior team as a starter, and when that didn’t happen, he applied to universities in the US to pursue his passion for technology, landing at Cornell to study for a graduate degree in computer science.

Nothing led Netravalkar to believe he’d be playing cricket once he got to the US. Ithaca, New York, home to Cornell, is known for its Ivy League scholarship, its monastic, fog-bound silences, and its mountainous beauty—not for cricket.

Imagine Netravalkar’s surprise, when he arrived in 2015, at seeing duffers swinging a cricket bat on the university’s verdant campus. Following the sound of the pock when bat meets ball, he ambled over to the players, mostly expats from countries where cricket is a national sport. The grounds at Cornell weren’t ideal for cricket, but it was better than nothing.

Casual encounters led to more formal trips around the country—to Los Angeles, Boston, and Florida—where he played in tournaments organized on long weekends. Three years after his arrival, Netravalkar was recruited by Oracle and, a master’s in computer science in hand, he moved himself and his future bride to the Bay Area, where they married in 2020.

There, he began making the six-hour drive from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to play in more serious weekend matches, often alongside members of the US national team. But even though he had come to the attention of national team head coach Arunkumar Jagadeesh, Netravalkar wasn’t eligible to play for the team because he hadn’t been in the US for the requisite seven consecutive years. Still, he started hitting the gym again to get back into the form needed for an international cricketer.

Right place, right time

And then everything changed. The International Cricket Council reduced the eligibility requirement to only three years—exactly the number of years that Netravalkar had been in the US. “I was in the right place at the right time, and the right things happened. And that’s where the journey started,” he says.

Netravalkar sees his arrival at Oracle in the same light. “I didn’t interview with anyone else because I liked Oracle,” he says, “and I liked the job because I specialized in databases at graduate school.”

Cricket and databases share more characteristics than one might think. Netravalkar notes that cricket strategy relies on data, including such metrics as batting strike rate, average runs scored, average wickets taken, and bowling economy rate, as well as data on the strengths and weaknesses of opponents and the different matchups between individual bowlers and batsmen. “I really focus on data because that helps me stay one step ahead,” says Netravalkar, who developed an application called CricDeCode while still a player in India to measure player performances according to a varied set of criteria. “And with the limited skills I have, I can still maximize my potential if I’m one step ahead.”

Netravalkar’s job at Oracle, where he helps develop search technology for vector databases, gave him the flexibility to play with the national team all around the country. Oracle also allowed him to take off during the entire cricket tournament this summer, giving him the opportunity to shine in two countries. Indeed, Netravalkar was as celebrated in India as he was across the US for his performance at the T20I.

Controlling the controllables

It isn’t lost on Netravalkar that at one time Oracle was a relatively new entrant in the cloud infrastructure sector, much as the US was an underdog in international cricket. But being an underdog, or a favorite, isn’t how he defines either pursuit.

“It’s about controlling the controllables,” he says. Whether you’re an underdog or a favorite, “your attitude toward any task that you do should be the same, because that’s the best you can do. The results will take care of themselves. Irrespective of my winning with a team that’s the underdog or the best team in the world, I still keep putting in that work and keep trying to learn something new every day. And that’s a goal that I achieved. So instead of a material goal, I’ll set a process-oriented goal.”

That attitude feeds into success on both the cricket grounds and in the development lab, Netravalkar says.

“If you’re playing a sport, you’re going to lose more often than you win,” he says. “As an athlete, you learn to accept that and you learn to accept defeat, bounce back stronger. Again, you learn to know that you can only do your role, and that your job is to be the best at what the team needs you to be. So the goal is for the team to win, not for you to succeed. And when you’re succeeding, it’s a byproduct of the team’s success.”

Tomorrow takes care of itself

Netravalkar is currently on paternity leave, but he expects to be back in the office—and on the cricket pitch—this fall. In fact, he took leave of his family for a weekend in July and led his Major League Cricket team, the Washington Freedom, to the 2024 championship, capping off a season in which he led the league in wickets taken (the cricket equivalent of baseball strikeouts).

Reflecting on what he and his team achieved this summer, both on the pitch and in the engineering lab, Netravalkar notes that there’s a lot more work to be done. “We’ve started the journey,” he says, “and if we keep going upward, we’ll make it big.”

Photography: Washington Freedom

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