Aditya Kanitkar, former golfer and brother of former India batsman Hrishikesh, explains how the likes of Sooryavanshi and Heinrich Klaasen convert ground forces into aerial supremacy in hitting sixes – golf style.
Aditya Kanitkar is a former golfer and currently a golf-coach in Pune. He is also the brother of former India cricketer Hrishikesh Kanitkar, and dabbles at Masters tennis besides golf and cricket, playing at Poona Club. Plenty of conversations within the family are about bat swings – at the intersection of golf and power-hitting cricket. It is not just India captain Harmanpreet Kaur that shadow-practices with a golf club before nets. Most bat swing coaching leans on golf to get the elevation and distance akin to driving on the greens.
Aditya Kanitkar breaks down the swing from head to toe:
Vaibhav Sooryavanshi and Heinrich Klaasen are a very good comparison, though both use golf stances in six-hitting. The biggest difference is Klaasen is tall and uses his long levers to create more speed in his bat flow. Vaibhav is shorter, but when he hits down to up, he creates a lot of rotations, that is, his body turns at a faster speed than most. What makes him a freak is, he has unreal, hand-eye coordination to match or sync his rotating body to that bat swing.