New project aims to jump-start cricket

A three-way project is about to pump some life into cricket. Working together, the Sports Development Foundation (SDF), the Institute of Sport (INSPORT) and the Jamaica Cricket Association (JCA) have designed a $12.5 million project aimed at unearthing a new generation of cricketers. According to Denzil Wilks, the SDF’s general manager, the objective is to address the sport’s fading popularity at the grassroots level.

“First of all, we want to ensure that we attract the youngsters to the game, make them excited about the game, so the idea is to get into the primary schools, to provide them with the plastic cricket bats and with the tennis balls or balls soft enough of that ilk and have them just playing the game, just enjoying the game, just batting the ball and enjoying it at the first stage,” Wilks explained on Tuesday.

Promising players will be selected for more formal training.

At the same time, the project will establish nurseries across the island. “Those nurseries where there is a concrete pitch and there is a clay pitch right beside each other, there are also some nets and a batsman can really work on his game and the opportunity is there also for the bowler who will run up because you’re providing the proper length and all of that, and so this idea of rekindling cricket at that level is something that the SDF has seen as critical to getting the game back to where it ought to be,” Wilks outlined with a view to the return of the West Indies to the top rung of world cricket.

“A sum of $12.5 million has already been approved,” he reported. “We actually wanted to start the project in the latter stage of 2021, which would have been the first school term of the current year, but the vagaries of the pandemic prevented us from actually starting. So, in this particular case, we actually have an approval and are ready to roll,” he confirmed.

Once it gets going, Wilks hopes the project will make the game as popular as it once was.

“At our level, we are of the view that part of it has to do with the fading popularity of the game at the grassroots level, at the junior level where, in our days, speaking personally now, cricket was being played in little lanes behind houses all over the place and that must have had to do with why you had the George Headleys to the Sobers, the Kanhais, and the rest of them coming all the way up to the Brian Laras,” he posited.

A recent COVID-19 surge is a worry. “Again, the pandemic is right there because we have to be very careful with this latest spike, but I can tell you that the commitment is there,” Wilks added.