Varun Aaron: From Fast Bowler to Coaching Innovator

Varun Aaron wasn’t hunting for a job when the phone rang. He was done. Retired at 35 earlier in 2025, finally at peace with a body that had fought him for most of his career, and enjoying the relative ease of broadcasting. No rehab schedules. No scans. No sleepless nights before a spell. Just the microphone, the monitor and the game.

Then Daniel Vettori called.

The Sunrisers coach wanted to know if Aaron would be interested in joining his staff. Coaching, formally at least, had never been the plan. Informally, he’d been doing it for years.

A fast bowler who had to become his own coach

Aaron’s career, as he tells it, forced him into coaching long before any title did. Injuries – stress fractures of the back, repeated breakdowns just when the door to higher honours opened – pushed him to dissect his own action, his own body, in microscopic detail.

"I think I've coached myself quite a bit because of the amount of injuries I've had," he reflects. He had become the guy teammates at Jharkhand turned to when their rhythm went missing, the bowler friends called when they wanted an extra yard of pace or a straighter front arm. He liked those conversations. He liked the impact.

The work wasn’t just ad hoc tips in the nets either. The new MRF Pace Foundation High Performance Center was his project from the ground up – concept, design, protocols, programme, even the redevelopment of the ground and gym. For a bowler who had once been a raw, tearaway product of that academy, it was a deliberate act of giving back. Later, he added a stint as a bowling consultant with the Jharkhand State Cricket Association.

Still, when retirement came, he refused to map out a second career.

"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 answer changed his year. It may yet define his next decade.

Building a pace attack from potential, not reputation

Aaron walked into his first IPL season as a coach with a clear brief: help build a bowling group and prepare young quicks for the league’s unforgiving spotlight.

Crucially, he was given a voice in the Sunrisers’ auction table strategy. That’s where names like Praful Hinge and Sakib Hussain caught his attention. They weren’t finished products. That was the point.

"What I saw was not what they were doing, but what they could do," Aaron says. "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 spectacularly early. Hinge and Sakib announced themselves against Rajasthan Royals, each taking four-wicket hauls in their first IPL game. Those spells didn’t appear out of nowhere. Aaron had been quietly putting in the hours with them in the lead-up to the tournament.

The twist: he was doing it around another full-time job.

Aaron was on broadcasting duty for the T20 World Cup, which turned his calendar into a jigsaw puzzle. Some days he brought Sakib to Mumbai, slipped into the studio in the morning, then headed out to coach in the evening. On other days, the order flipped. As the World Cup schedule tightened and travel ramped up, he needed a trusted pair of hands to keep the work going.

He sent Hinge and Saqib to the Rao Cricket Academy, to SS Rao – his former Jharkhand captain and a man he trusted implicitly.

"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 became the headline stories, but they weren’t the only quicks who stirred his imagination.

"I think Shivang [Kumar] was unbelievable as well. And then you had Onkar [Tarmale] 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."

The freedom to make those “interesting picks” mattered. It told him the franchise trusted his eye.

"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," he admits. "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."

The gospel of simplicity – tailored to every bowler

Backing from the top is one thing. Turning that into day-to-day improvement is another. Aaron leans on what his own body taught him over 15 hard years: pace is brutal, but its principles are simple.

"Fast bowling is really simple, but I think as a player you complicate it a lot," he explains. "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."

Simplicity, though, doesn’t mean a one-size-fits-all manual. He rejects that idea outright.

"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."

He treats performances the same way – not as simple good-or-bad verdicts, but as clues.

"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'. 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."

That mindset hits particularly hard in a world obsessed with the speed gun.

Beyond the speed gun: timing, not just thunder

For a young quick, the number on the big screen can become an identity. Aaron knows that rush intimately. His own career exploded into view when he clocked 153kph in the 2010/11 Vijay Hazare Trophy final, at a time when genuine high pace in India was still a rarity.

Even now, the first thing many youngsters want to discuss with him is speed. He doesn’t dismiss it. He reframes 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."

Few coaches can speak about that tension with his authority. After his Ranji Trophy debut in 2008/09, he suffered three stress fractures of the back. Test cricket brought another cruel pause: a debut in 2011, then a gap of almost three years before his second Test in 2014 because his back gave way again.

For most of his playing life, he lived on that knife-edge between the hunger for speed and the limits of his own body. As a coach, he now helps others walk that same line.

Two jobs, one obsession

The schedule is punishing. Coaching commitments, IPL prep, World Cup broadcasting, travel that blurs cities and time zones. It’s not just his body that has to adjust now, but his personal life.

"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 dual roles feed each other. Coaching has given his commentary a sharper edge.

"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."

He sees patterns others might miss. He recognises tells under pressure. He understands why a bowler changes a field or reaches for a particular delivery. The commentary box becomes another vantage point to study his craft.

A new calling, discovered late

For someone who never mapped out a life in coaching, Aaron sounds like a man who has stumbled onto his true work.

"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."

The fast bowler who once measured his days by how quickly he could hit 150kph now measures them by something quieter, but perhaps more enduring: the look in a young quick’s eyes when the ball finally does exactly what they’d imagined.

The speed gun used to tell him who he was. Now, the progress of others does.