Mumbai, May 29 -- "It's a very dear club to me. Good that I was wearing dark glasses otherwise, you would have seen some emotions." Amol Muzumdar was at the Kalpesh Koli inter-camp final at New Hind CC in Matunga last Friday. Standing there though, it seemed he was somewhere else entirely - back to the nets where he batted as a boy, back to the seniors he grew up watching, back, in spirit, to the Dadar Parsee Zoroastrian Cricket Club (DPZ). "My association with DPZ goes back to around 1990," he said. He would go on to score 260 on his Ranji debut (a world record at the time), be labelled the next Tendulkar, and eventually become head coach of the Indian women's team that won the World Cup last year. But before all of that, there was Dadkar Maidan, there were the nets, and there was Mangesh Bhalekar, General Secretary, making sure they were always available for free. This year, 'Zopdi,' as the club is fondly called, turned 100. It was founded in 1926 by Jehangir Pithawala, a young Parsi known to everyone as Masa, around a radical idea: a cricket club with no membership fee, no bar, no card room, no smoking, just a ground and a set of stumps. In a country where gymkhanas were social clubs that happened to have cricket grounds, Masa built something defiantly different. What he built, it turned out, was a nursery for greatness. Lalchand Rajput, a young man from Chembur who needed nets and found them always open, went on to open for India and manage the team that won the inaugural World T20. Chandrakant Pandit captained DPZ with the same ferocity he later brought to coaching Vidarbha and Kolkata Knight Riders. Sanjay Bangar played here. So did Muzumdar. Dilip Vengsarkar turned out for DPZ in a Police Shield invitational and helped them win the title. "For 100 years, thousands have played here in multiple tournaments. So many became India players, Ranji players or U-19. We still provide free coaching and we won't let the club's tradition be disturbed," said Bhalekar, a Shiv Chhatrapati awardee. Bombay cricket royalty Madhav Mantri and Naren Tamhane spent their post-playing years there, attending every match and selecting the team. When the cricket stops for the day, the dressing rooms become classrooms for BMC school children who have no quiet space to study at home, and the club actively hosts BMC inter-school tournaments as well providing them with free kits. In 2016, the Government of India recognised DPZ with the Rashtriya Khel Protsahan Puruskar for four decades of free coaching. "Rich kids always get chances," said Bhalekar. "But who looks after the poor? Maybe God sent me for this." Muzumdar, standing next door to the ground where it all began for him, put it simply: "Day after day, I used to bat. Day after day the nets were available and I got to play matches." Day after day. For a hundred years, that has been the whole point....