IBM has become the first Silicon Valley tech company to build a regulation cricket oval on its campus. The installation of the blue turf field is the brainchild of IBM executive Dinesh Nirmal, who hopes the sport brings “health, connection, and creativity” to employees and high school students taking part in the “Cricket and Code” program within IBM’s AI camp.
The field’s grand opening and first game are taking place today, Apr. 30, with a ceremony to be attended by Sanjay Panda, India’s consul general in San Francisco and an advocate for the Indian tech community in the Bay Area, as well as Khanh Russo, a senior policy advisor in San Jose’s mayoral office.
“I think cricket and coding have a lot in common,” Nirmal explained in an email to SportTechie. “As with software development, you need to be agile, to respond in an instant to unforeseen events—in cricket you have to calculate in the blink of an eye how the arc and pace of the ball are affected by the onset of wind, for example. In both, you need to pay attention to quality. Cricket is also collaborative. If you’re a fieldsperson, for example, you practically need to be able to read the pitcher’s mind. It’s the same teamwork I see inside the lab.”
Nirmal is a VP for data and AI development as well as the site executive for IBM’s Silicon Valley Lab in San Jose. He began playing cricket at the age of four in his native India—“the only sport I knew,” he wrote. Nirmal touted cricket’s accessibility as a sport, describing homemade bats made of coconut leaves and balls fashioned from rocks with cloth wrapped around.
He is looking forward to introducing the sport to area youth this summer both for entertainment and for the transferrable skills he believes cricket offers.
“The goal of AI Camp is to provide students in the local community education and experiences they wouldn’t otherwise have access to,” Nirmal wrote. “Cricket can play an enormous role in this training. Some of the most important traits in a developer or data scientist are teamwork, leadership, problem solving and agile thinking. These are all honed in the game of cricket, whether from captaining a team or practicing batting skills.”
Nirmal stated that another goal is to encourage more engineers and developers to step away from their computer screens to partake in physical activity. IBM has protected tens of thousands of acres near its San Jose campus in part for that reason. The blue cricket field is also lined for use in other sports, such as soccer.
“It’s been a highlight of my career to watch spirits at Silicon Valley Lab rise over the past few years. Cricket is one part of it, having school children here to learn AI is another,” he wrote, adding: “Individually, our new programs and technologies are exciting, but seeing them come together to create a place for our teams to work that’s humming with energy and initiative has been rewarding beyond anything else.”