He decided to continue to a PhD and approached Cricket Australia to discuss ideas around injury prevention. “I went to Cricket Australia, and they said that they were well-covered at the international level, however at the junior grassroots, club cricket level, not much work had been done. There wasn’t a lot of baseline data available on why injuries happen, on the physical characteristics or risk factors, or on how we can develop programs to mitigate those risks,” Soomro says.
“So, I thought of a solution, to develop an app where players can instantaneously report injuries and I could prioritise going to see that person, rather than going from ground to ground.” He also examined what other sports were doing to prevent injuries and collected data on 12,000 cricketers around the world – studying over one million hours of cricket and more than a million injury-based articles.
His thesis, Cricket Injury Prevention, a collaboration with Cricket Australia, resulted in the creation of the free mobile app, TeamDoc, and the development of the world’s first Cricket Injury Prevention Program (CIPP).
Soomro went on to work as a resident medical officer at regional hospitals in Victoria and Western Australia – at the same time as working with numerous sports teams, including the Dalyellup Beach Cricket Club, the Mallee Murray Bulls, and South Broken Hill Cricket Clubs, Cricket NSW, IronMan WA, West Coast Fever Netball, St George Dragons Rugby League Club and FIFA, before scoring the role of team doctor for South Fremantle Football Club.