Having jumped straight into action with a planning meeting with health partners Ezintsha and then 2 workshops back-to-back in Hammanskraal and Mamelodi, the weekend and the start of the week provided the opportunity to get to know the team at Northerns Cricket Union a little better, to understand the structures that were in place to grow the game and develop cricketers across Tshwane, a metropolitan municipality which covers Pretoria and the surrounding areas.
We kicked the weekend off with a trip to Sahara Park, in the shadow of Benoni’s cricket stadium, to watch a warm-up game for the Northerns Cricket Union U19 Women against their counterparts from their neighbours Eastern. With shades of cricket watching back in the UK the intermittent showers failed to take the enjoyment out pf the day as we saw Martileze, who has attended both workshops in her role as U19 and Women’s coach, put her charges through their paces. Some decisive stroke play allowed the team to set a defendable total, and they made a good start with the ball too before the rain really set in and pulled everyone off and under the pitch-side shelters.
It was great to catch up with Martileze and find out a little bit more about the structures in place for women and girls’ cricket in South Africa in general, and Northerns in particular. It was interesting to hear about the support the girls received to make sure they were able to play, such as travel stipends for those who had to make the journey from areas like Hammanskraal and Mameldoi in order to make training, match fees to play, and performance-based rewards. This financial support is unique to Northerns in the CSA set up and is a vital first step to ensuring equitable opportunities to play, ensuring girls who might otherwise be obliged to get jobs to contribute to the family income can continue to be involved in the sport.
We also had a great chat about opportunities to look at whole athlete development as part of cricket programmes – and using workshops and external experts to add value to players’ development. We kicked this off straight away on following Monday with a “HIV Self Screening 101” session at the end of the women’s training at Super Sport Park. With only one member of the squad aware of HIV self-screening this proved a great opportunity to share the message about this option, as well as having a frank discussion about the options available to women for HIV prevention and treatment, and highlighting the position they inevitably have as role models to others as high performance athletes, who if well informed can sway mindsets amongst their peers.
Monday morning saw us settled into the boardroom with Sibonelo, the coach development manager for Northerns Cricket Union, with South Africa 9 down and England looking set for the win. This was a great opportunity to find out more about the coaches we had been working with prior to the weekend, the organisational structure that supported them, and to discuss Northerns’ vision for the project in the future.
With coached from 5 areas represented across the workshops, and a total of 20 or so coaches working across those 5 areas, we hashed out an initial plan to support these guys for 3 months following this launch project. We chatted about what their normal coaching week looked like, and discussed the different opportunities for delivering the message including during warm-up ups, at training and in the high schools they work in. Central to this would be consolidating the training about HIV Self-Screening and health more generally with the area coordinators, with support from Ezintsha, so that they feel more confident when talking about the project to schools and other potential areas for delivery as well as answering questions for their player.
We’ll top that up with a regular drip-feeding of ideas and games every other week, that can be played to deliver the messages. To supplement these CWB designed games we’ll also collect all the games that get invented over the next couple of days of mentoring, as well as those devised in the workshops, and bring those together in a digital resource (look out for a downloadable version of this on this blog!). And most importantly we will spend the 3 months gradually building coaches’ confidence so that at the end of it, no matter if we secure future funding or not, the coaches in these areas will have the tools to continue to deliver these activities and empowering their players with factually accurate information about health.
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