Our people

Dhana founded Elite Cricket Group, which runs the Elite Cricket Academy centres, the Victorian Elite Cricket League and Elite Sport. He is a Cricket Australia Level 2 accredited coach.

In 2020 he built the first integrated training facility of its kind in Melbourne’s west, at Hoppers Crossing — the centre the academy opened in the following year and the league has run on since. In the almost six years since, Elite has delivered more than ten thousand hours of one-to-one coaching, run several high performance programmes, and hosted and trained players who have gone on to represent at a high level.

He has run inbound and outbound programmes in both directions before this one: players coming to Australia to train and play, and Australian players going the other way. He also built the structure underneath it all — the centres, the league, the registration platform and the Indian operation — and he reads and answers the enquiries that come into info@vecl.au himself, rather than routing them to a form.

Sivasankari co-founded Elite Cricket Group and has been part of building all three Elite centres — Hoppers Crossing, Pakenham, and Chennai — from the first one in Melbourne’s west onwards. The places this league trains in exist because she helped build them.

She has been part of VECL since it started, and part of the Elite tours to India that ran before it. The two-country pathway the league now runs is not a new idea here: it is something she has helped organise, staff and pay for across several years of touring, long before it had a name on a website.

Her involvement is the day-to-day kind rather than the ceremonial kind — the arrangements behind a tour, the centres being ready, the things that have to work before a player ever walks onto a ground. She does it because she loves the game and believes in what the league is for.

Andrew is one of the three directors of the Victorian Elite Cricket League and leads the Victorian Elite – KIOC High Performance International Pathway. He is a Cricket Australia Level 3 accredited coach.

He has been going to KIOC since 2013. That decade-long relationship with Irfan Sait and his staff is the reason the coaching side of this programme could start immediately rather than be built from nothing — the two ends already know how each other work.

On the pathway he is accountable for the cricket: the selection standard, the curriculum, individual development plans, leading the camp coaching, match preparation, and the written post-tour reports players take home. He is the link between the players, the league and KIOC, year-round rather than for two weeks a year — three visits to India across April, September and December, and coaching KIOC groups when they come to Melbourne.

Taking a squad overseas is a different job from coaching at home, and he has done it before: managing workload across consecutive days in heat, preparing players for conditions they have not met, and the duty of care that comes with taking other people’s children to another country.

George is Director of Coaching at Elite Cricket Academy and Head Coach of the Western Falcons.

Shan is a senior coach with the league.

Hayden coaches with the league.

Vivek Ranjan is head coach of VECL India, the league’s Chennai end.

Irfan founded the Karnataka Institute of Cricket in Bengaluru, which marked its silver jubilee in 2021. KIOC’s published profile records more than thirty years of coaching, and accreditation from three countries: ECB Level III, Cricket Australia Level II and KSCA Level I.

He and his staff coach our players at their own academy, on their own surfaces, and arrange the Indian opposition our squads play. KIOC is a separate organisation with its own name, marks and curriculum — it is a partnership, not a franchise.