Shikha Pandey
Squadron Leader (retired) Shikha Subas Pandey (born 12 May 1989) is an Indian cricketer[1] and former officer in the Indian Air Force (IAF).[2][3][4] She plays for the national cricket team as a right-arm medium pacer and middle-order batter, and was an IAF air traffic control officer.[2][3]
Pandey made her international Twenty20 (T20) debut on 9 March 2014 against Bangladesh at Cox's Bazar cricket stadium in Bangladesh.[5][6] In August of the same year, she made her One Day International cricket (ODI) and Test cricket debuts against England at Wormsley and Scarborough, respectively.
Pandey did her schooling under the Central Board of Secondary Education, India. At the age of 15, she became the first player affiliated with state board to represent India.[7] Within months of this affiliation and getting introduced into the formal set-up, Surekha Bhandare, former Mumbai player and selector, saw her playing and believed that Pandey had all the markings of a future India player. "The raw talent in her was hard to go unnotice," Bhandare was quoted stating.[7] In the class-ten board (secondary school) exams, she won the state-wide third rank. It was then that she decided to focus more on studies and cricket took a back seat for the next three years. It was not before her second year as an undergraduate in Electronics and Electrical Engineering that she began pursuing the sport with serious intent.[7]
Academics has always been important to Pandey and had to juggle cricket and college, where she would spend her morning doing gym sessions and academic work, and her afternoons would include a 12 km journey to Mapusa so she could train under Nitin Vernekar, former Goa cricketer and Sports Authority of Goa coach.[7] This phase was very crucial to her growth as a cricketer as being the only girl at the boy's facility facing U-16 and U-19 boys honed her reaction time against pace bowling.[7]
However, she did not let her focus on game affect her academic performance. She particularly credits Ujwala Phadte, her lecturer in Applied Mathematics for helping her throughout this phase and making sure her grades were not inversely proportional to her on-field performance.[7]
After completing her engineering degree from Goa College of Engineering in 2010, three multinational companies offered her opportunities, but she declined all these placement offers and decided to take a year off and focus on her cricketing career completely.[7] In July 2011, she joined Indian Air Force, and in June 2012 was commissioned as an air traffic controller.[8][9] At the time of the 2020 ICC Women's T20 World Cup, she held the rank of Squadron Leader.[4]
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