He was the goalkeeper of his school football team and was able to play for the district and state level. But he shifted his focus to cricket sometime around 1993. The story of his introduction to the game is now famous. He was keeping goal in a football match when he was spotted by Keshab Ranjan Banerjee, a senior sports teacher at his school, Jawahar Vidya Mandir. Banerjee, impressed by Dhoni's saves, thought of trying him out behind the stumps for the school's cricket team, since the regular wicketkeeper had become unavailable. Banerjee invited him to nets practice that winter. By the time Dhoni graduated six years later, he had broken more than one windowpane in the school building with his lofted sixes.
He was a huge fan of Sachin Tendulkar