CHARLESTOWN, Nevis - A new phase of cricket in the West Indies will be unveiled on Monday with the start of the Sagicor West Indies Cricket Board High Performance Centre.
The Centre will be based at the 3Ws Oval at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies in Barbados and is geared towards refining the skills and charting the way forward in the development of 15 of the best young cricketers in the region.
President of the West Indies Cricket Board, Dr Julian Hunte, outlined the details behind the Sagicor West Indies Cricket HPC.
“This is a very significant step forward in the future development of cricket in the Caribbean. As everyone if fully aware, West Indies cricket has faced several challenges and we are taking steps to ensure that were harness and nurture the talent that we see in this cricket-loving region. We have assembled an excellent group of young men to form part of the future of West Indies cricket and I want to wish then all the best,” he said.
“Gone are the days when you could dominate world sport on talent alone, so we know that in order to compete with the other teams on the world stage, we have to look closely at the development of our young players, and provide them with the skills and equip them with the tools to do the job. This is what we aim to do at the Sagicor West Indies Cricket HPC.”
The first groups of 15 young cricketers were selected from players across the regions, who were nominated by their local cricket board. They are: Shamarh Brooks, Jason Holder, Shane Dowrich (Barbados), Kyle Corbin, Kevin McClean (Combined Campuses & Colleges), Brandon Bess, Ravindra Chandrika, Veerasammy Permaul (Guyana), Nkrumah Bonner, Andre Creary (Jamaica), Kieran Powell, Devon Thomas (Leeward Islands), Shannon Gabriel (Trinidad and Tobago) Keron Cottoy, Delorn Johnson (Windward Islands).
The Head Coach and Director for the Sagicor West Indies Cricket HPC is Toby Radford. As a cricketer, he represented Middlesex for several seasons in the English County Cricket Championship and after retiring from the game, distinguished himself as the head of the Academy at the Middlesex County Cricket Club. He was also Head Coach at Middlesex when they won the domestic Twenty20 Tournament and a National Coach with the England and Wales Cricket Board.
Radford said it is an honour to work with the emerging players in Caribbean.
WICB CEO Ernest Hilaire indiavted in a recent interview that the players will undergo thre months of intense work which would involve improvement in their basic cricketing skills and also theoretical work which would involve certain aspects of evaluating themselves using computer graphic. They will then be sent on a tour and towards the end of the year, will be released to their various territories for participation in the WICB regional tournament.
In year two, the format will be very much the same after which the players would be hopefully better prepared to represent the West Indies senior team.
