So on to today, both Tim & myself slept through his alarm which left us no time for breakfast, so that could have gone a bit better. We went back to MYSA with the main aim of playing some cricket games with various schools that were going to visit in the morning and afternoon.
One of the things that we do out here in Africa is train other coaches, to the point there they become officially ICC qualified. At MYSA we’ve got a great bunch of about 10 local coaches that were trained for a couple of days before we arrived, that means that many of them had never heard of cricket before this week! Personally I’ve been really impressed with their attitude and their abilities that we decided to really work with a few of the best of them to improve their skills even more…that’s where I came in.
One of the most important things as a coach is being able to give a basic, but technically perfect, demonstration of a skill. With a group of 4 of them I ran through 8 basic fielding skills from throwing & catching, picking up the ball and retrieving the ball. Each skill has different important points and so by the end of the hour or two their minds were understandably bursting! Perfect time to coach them how to bowl! That was interesting, in particular getting them to understand the importance of bowling with a straight arm. Each of these coaches is responsible to coach the other coaches, who are in turn responsible to coach the children. That means if one coach is bowling illegally, it could mean 100 children will learn to bowl incorrectly. By the end of that hour or two I was pretty impressed with everybody, and when I finished for lunch they were all continuing to help one another bowl which was lovely to see.
While I was doing that the rest of the team, led by Rich, played cricket skill games with about 40 children from local schools on a small astro-turf pitch. One of the key things about this session was seeing how to incorporate the ABC HIV/AIDS messages in to cricket, I’m told it worked really well. It sounds easy, but is pretty difficult and a lot of the children just look to the floor when we talk so it’s a difficult message to get across.
In the afternoon Rich took over from me and showed the coaches how to do the basic batting skills to a high standard, I think they were keen to learn reverse-flicks and Dilscoops but I haven’t found out if Rich has embraced these dark arts yet. While he was doing that the rest of us played more cricket games for an unknown number of children on a huge dustbowl/football pitch.
This was my first experience of trying to run large-scale games like this, it feels like the objective is largely to contain the chaos. Just as everything is set up with each volunteer-coach running their own game for 15 kids another group would turn up. By the end of it our resources were spread thin and my ideas running out, but we got through well, especially considering it was the first time we’d seen anything like this.
We ventured out of the hotel in the evening to see a bit more of Nairobi. It was interesting to venture in to a less slummy part of the city where the houses looked a bit nicer, and people weren’t climbing around on trash on the sides of the road looking for scraps. Rather than pros & cons of either, I just thought the contrast was quite stark considering it’s the same city with the same human beings at the heart of it.
