Varun Aaron's Journey from Player to Fast-Bowling Coach

Varun Aaron wasn’t looking for a job when the phone rang. He wasn’t plotting his next move, drawing up CVs or chasing roles. He had retired earlier in 2025 at 35, slipped into the relative comfort of broadcasting, and was finally learning what it felt like to live without a rehab schedule.

Then Daniel Vettori called.

That one conversation pulled Aaron back into a world he thought he’d left behind, only this time with a clipboard instead of the new ball – as fast-bowling coach at Sunrisers.

From self‑repair to shaping careers

Coaching had never been a grand plan. It had been a habit.

Years of injuries forced Aaron to become his own mechanic. Stress fractures, back trouble, long layoffs – all of it pushed him to study his action, his body, his limits. While still playing for Jharkhand, teammates would drift towards him, asking about their run-up, their wrist position, their follow-through. He kept answering, kept tinkering.

“I think I've coached myself quite a bit because of the amount of injuries I've had,” he says. Helping others soon became an extension of that. Friends, colleagues, young quicks – they’d ask for his views, and he found he liked the feeling of making a difference.

That informal guidance gradually hardened into structure. The new MRF Pace Foundation High Performance Center was his project from the ground up – design, protocols, programme, even the redevelopment of the ground and gym. It was his way of paying back an academy that had shaped him. A stint as bowling consultant with the Jharkhand State Cricket Association followed.

Still, he wasn’t mapping out a coaching career. Not consciously.

“After retiring, I really was not setting out any targets. I was not thinking, ‘I want to coach, I want to commentate.’ After having a journey which was hampered by injuries throughout, all I wanted to do was enjoy myself after retiring, and whatever came about after that just happened on its own. And then one day, Dan rang me up and asked me if I was interested to coach Sunrisers.”

The casual invitation turned into a first season with serious responsibility.

Building a pace unit from scratch

Sunrisers didn’t just ask Aaron to turn up and run drills. They handed him a say in auction strategy and the shape of their bowling group. For a first-year coach, that sort of trust is rare.

He went hunting for potential, not polish. Names like Praful Hinge and Sakib Hussain stood out.

“What I saw was not what they were doing, but what they could do,” Aaron explains. “I had a feeling that we could achieve what I could envision they could do, which they weren't doing. I'm glad it just worked out.”

It worked out in a hurry. Against Rajasthan Royals, both Hinge and Sakib ripped through the opposition with four-wicket hauls on IPL debut, a statement performance that announced not just their arrival but also the eye that had backed them.

Those spells didn’t come out of nowhere. Aaron had spent weeks preparing them for the tournament, though the schedule was far from straightforward. He was also on T20 World Cup broadcasting duty, juggling commentary boxes and coaching nets.

Some days he’d bring Sakib to Mumbai, call the game in the morning and coach in the evening. Other days, the order flipped. When the World Cup calendar became too tight, he dispatched Hinge and Sakib to the Rao Cricket Academy with a clear plan.

The choice of destination was personal. SS Rao had captained Aaron at Jharkhand and remains one of the few people he trusts implicitly with fast bowlers.

“Me and SS Rao have a brotherly relationship,” Aaron says. “He was captain when I played for Jharkhand and I wanted them to go to somebody who I trust, and basically if I tell that person what has to be done, he does exactly that and nothing different. So I sent them there with a set of instructions that they have to do this, this, this, and he absolutely abided by it. Obviously, him being so experienced, his presence and his energy did so much good to them, also his coaching.”

Hinge and Sakib were the headline acts, but not the only ones. Shivang Kumar impressed him. Onkar Tarmale, who picked up an injury at the wrong moment and never got to show himself, also sits firmly in Aaron’s notebook.

“I think Shivang was unbelievable as well. And then you had Onkar who hadn't played. He just got injured at the right time, so people didn't see him, but he's somebody who can move 145. We had some really good, interesting picks.”

All of this was possible because the franchise cleared the runway.

“When you're empowered by the head coach and the team owner in that fashion, I really feel your job becomes all that much easier,” Aaron says. “I think I was really lucky to be a part of a brilliant team, because it's not very common that in your first year you get an almost free hand to do what you want to. Through that, I just felt I could express myself creatively in whatever I did and it was a lot of fun.”

Fast bowling, stripped back

Aaron’s own career gave him a deep, sometimes painful education in pace. He lived the extremes – the thrill of 153kph in the 2010/11 Vijay Hazare Trophy final, at a time when genuine pace in India was still a curiosity, and the reality of three stress fractures of the back after his Ranji debut in 2008/09. Even his Test career came in stuttering bursts, with almost three years between his first cap in 2011 and his second in 2014.

Those scars inform how he coaches now.

“Fast bowling is really simple, but I think as a player you complicate it a lot,” he says. “You try different things. But at the end of the day, it just boils down to a few very basic principles. If you can simplify it or if you have somebody who can simplify it, then it just makes your journey a whole lot more enjoyable and easy.”

Simple doesn’t mean one-size-fits-all. That’s a line he refuses to cross.

“There's no set method to coaching. It completely depends on the individual. I think every individual comes with certain skill sets. Number one, you've got to identify what's unique about the bowler. And amplify it. And if there are any shortcomings, you just have to make the bowler more efficient.

“Some bowlers just present with a beautiful action and they're able to execute whatever they want. And some bowlers just have injury history, have different actions which don't make it easy for them. So, that's when you have to do some work. Everybody's different. Every bowler presents differently. And I feel that's where coaching has to head, where you see every bowler as an individual because everybody has different musculature, everybody's got different minds, everybody's got different coordination, everybody's got different biomechanics.”

The speed gun, inevitably, still dominates conversations with young quicks. They want numbers. They want 150kph. Aaron understands the obsession better than most, but he tries to turn their focus away from raw velocity to what creates it.

“Fast bowling is all about timing,” he says. “When you're batting, you want to time your initial movement correctly so you're in a balanced position, your head is stable and you have time to access the ball. In bowling, your timing has to be spot-on before you release the ball. If you boil it down to one thing, if your timing and the sequencing of your action is right, I think you've won the battle. You will bowl as fast as you can, you won't be injured and you bowl the ball where you want to. And you can only bowl as fast as you can. You can't bowl faster than your body is going to allow.”

That last line could have been the theme of his playing days. Now it’s a warning and a guide for the next generation.

Coaching the mind as much as the action

Aaron doesn’t stop at biomechanics. He digs into the why behind every spell.

“I genuinely think that you can't look at somebody's performance and be like, ‘Oh, that was a bad performance’ or ‘that was a good performance’,” he says. “As a coach, I really feel you've got to find the reason behind a bad performance or a good performance. If it's a good performance, you should make sure that the bowler remembers why he or she performed well. And if it's a bad performance, it's something to take away from. You can learn from it. But if you just meander along day after day, just bowl, go home, bowl, go home, then it doesn't really add up to anything.”

It’s the sort of detail that bleeds into his other job too. Coaching has sharpened his eye in the commentary box.

“It gives me a lot more insight. Obviously, you know a lot of players from before, but when you coach them, you know the inner depths of their mind. It helps you be a lot more predictive in your commentary because you know what the player does when he's under pressure. You know what the player's go-to ball is. You know what the player's field set is when he bowls a particular delivery. So, from that angle, coaching definitely helps broadcasters because you have a lot more recency and first-hand information about players. And like coaching helps broadcasting, sometimes broadcasting also helps coaching because I'm almost seeing all these players throughout different competitions.”

The trade-off is time. Time at home, mostly.

“How do I balance that? That's a question you have to ask my girlfriend because she's not the happiest customer – I'm hardly at home. But, yeah, I'm trying to give her and my family more time. It is quite hectic, but it is very enjoyable,” he says.

The schedule is relentless. The satisfaction, by the sound of it, is too.

A late-found calling

For someone who never sat down and decided, “I will be a coach,” Aaron talks about it now with the certainty of a man who has finally stumbled onto his thing.

“What it has taught me about myself is that coaching gives me immense happiness. There is no greater joy than talking to a bowler after a session and he has achieved every single thing he wanted to from that session.”

From self-coached survivor to the architect of a new fast-bowling crop, Aaron has moved quietly but decisively into a role the sport clearly needs him to play. The question now isn’t whether he wanted to coach.

It’s how many quicks he can shape before the next generation stops asking about speed – and starts asking about timing.