New cricket pitch unveiled at Spine Road High

Mitchell’s Plain schools cricket hub coach, Keith Minnaar, is upbeat about the prospect of unearthing future provincial and national players, following last week’s opening of the newly laid turf at Spine Road High.

To celebrate the unveiling of the new pitch, players and teachers from Rocklands and Spine Road high schools faced off in a friendly knockabout. The two schools are among four in the area that currently form part of the Mitchell’s Plain high schools cricket hub with its main base at Spine Road High. The hub is part of a wider programme established by Cricket South Africa to promote the game in areas where not enough cricket is being played, where there’s a lack of facilities or where players have to fork out a fortune on travelling expenses.

Similar hubs have been established in Khayelitsha, Langa and at various clubs across the city, including at Kenwyn-based Victoria Cricket Club, St Augustine in Elfindale, Primrose CC’s home ground on Rosmead Avenue in Kenilworth and at Tygerberg CC in Ravensmead.

“Well, on Thursday we opened the Spine Road cricket field with teachers from the hub high schools playing a friendly match. We hope to have another friendly game to promote cricket more in the high schools,” said Minnaar.

He said the hubs programme has been around for a while and that they’d love to see more girls get involved, considering that South Africa hosted the ICC Women's T20 World Cup in 2023.

“The hubs came about to feed the pipe line to the province and let the best players play against each other. In Mitchell’s Plain we have four high schools and four primary hub schools. The high schools’ section also includes Princeton and Westridge,” he said.

To help prepare for upcoming matches, Minnaar and girls’ coach Jonathan Julie took their charges through their paces at a training session following last week’s grand opening. He said having a proper training facility will help them prepare better for tournaments, hub versus hub matches and in schools league. The training squad includes under-15 and under-19 boys and girls from the various hub schools.

“So Spine Road had to relay the school field after COVID since the field was in bad state,” he said. “It gets maintained by a garden company and coaches help with the marking and rolling of the pitches before game days as we only started using it this term,” he said.

Julie has been coaching the girls three years now with most of his current squad starting out this year. He says he’s happy to see more girls getting involved.

“They have played two matches this year and have won both, despite one being by default,” he said. “They seem to be very willing to participate and it shows in the current increasing number of girls this year especially on training. The average has gone up to about six girls compared to last year's two at training. So I'd say it's very good to see from my point of view as a coach,” he said.

“I believe that with more exposure to cricket in a general sense, whether watching or playing, or having access to matches, we can get more girls to start playing,” he said.