Jonty Rhodes shares his secrets with young cricketers
Rhodes joined each tournament for two days, to help cricketers and coaches from each school.
In 10 years’ time, the South African cricket team should be less of an embarrassment in the World Cup, judging by the enthusiasm with which primary school cricketers and their coaches took to the fields during White River Primary School’s tenth Cricket Week.
Hopefully the efforts Jonty Rhodes and Ryan Maron and his team of eight Cricket School of Excellence (CSE) coaches put into the week will also help.
The week was again divided into two tournaments; the first tournament for u/9, u/10 and u/11 teams (from June 30 to July 3) and the second for u/12 and u/13 teams (from July 3 to 6).
Participating schools were White River, Barberton, Nelspruit, Nelspruit Primary, Malelane, Klipfontein, Kanonkop, Clivia, Uplands, Uthukela Sport Academy, Bergland, Laeveld, Steelpoort Akademie, Lydenburg and Monument. These 15 schools sent 456 boys in 37 teams and they were accompanied by 74 coaches.
Rhodes joined each tournament for two days, to help cricketers and coaches from each school on different occasions, coached fielding sessions and addressed the coaches on their task. The coaching took place at different fields and included all the aspects of the game.
Teams were housed in the hostels of White River Primary and Rob Ferreira High School and the event was made possible through sponsorships of several Lowveld businesses.
Each day teams played 20-over matches and had a coaching session. On Wednesday everybody assembled for their fielding session with Rhodes, after which the participants in the first tournament left.
That afternoon the u/12 and u/13 teams had their fielding session before their series of matches started on Thursday.
For the first time, the games were broadcast on DigiTV. Live scoring was used during matches to keep everybody up to date.
