Mbasa Gqadushe, head coach of the Mpumalanga Rhinos, has been nominated for a special award by Cricket South Africa (CSA) after he and the Rhinos had enjoyed a memorable 2024/25 season.

The Mpumalanga Rhinos enjoyed a highly successful 2024/25 season with Gqadushe at the helm, along with assistant coach Gerhard Vosloo. This has led to Gqadushe’s nomination for the Division 2 Coach of the Year Award at the 2025 CSA Awards. The awards will be held on July 31 at Emperors Palace in Kempton Park.

The 2024/25 CSA domestic cricket season was by far the Mpumalanga Rhinos’ best to date since the advent of the new domestic system in the 2021/22 season.

The team enjoyed an improved season in 2023/24 and looked to build on that momentum in 2024/25. They managed to do just that.

With two wins, three draws and only one loss in the CSA 4-Day Series Division 2 competition, the Rhinos were almost unstoppable and narrowly missed a spot in the final, finishing third. They were just as good in the CSA Provincial One-Day Challenge Division 2 competition. Five wins and two losses to their name lifted them to third and within one point of a place in the final.

Things didn’t quite go as well in the CSA T20 Knock-Out Competition, where they finished sixth with two wins, three losses and one no result.

Gqadushe joined Mpumalanga Cricket in the 2018/19 season as a player-coach, which was coincidentally his last season as a player. Since then he’s held various coaching positions within Mpumalanga Cricket and the union’s development structures around the province. He moved inland from KZN, where he had spent many years playing first-class cricket for the union.