CFX Academy: Gwynne Jones

CFX ACADEMY NEWS

As the second year of the CFX Academy in Harare draws to a close, director Gwynne Jones talks to John Ward about how it is all going and the plans for the future. First of all, here is an official resume from the Academy about itself.

The CFX Academy in Zimbabwe was established by Dave Houghton who raised the initial capital with his sponsored walk from Bulawayo to Harare which took 22 days in June 1998 and raised over $900 000.

The CFX is a non-profit organization funded by the community at large and the business community in particular. A fully equipped pavilion with state-of-the-art presentation facilities is nearing completion. The ground has been upgraded and now has a wicket that the New Zealanders described as the best wicket they had played on. Bob Woolmer, on a recent coaching visit, commented that the Academy's facilities were among the best he had seen anywhere in the world. The initial set-up of six all-weather nets with floodlights, three turf nets and three cricket cages to be used on the main wicket were included in the original capital budget. The operating budget is now over $4 million per annum.

The name `CFX Cricket Academy' is derived from our main sponsor CFX [a foreign exchange company] who have committed themselves to sponsoring the Academy up to the next World Cup in 2003. Joining CFX are individuals and businesses who are approached to sponsor the CFX Cricket Academy and who are identified by boundary-board advertising around the cricket ground which is at Country Club [in the eastern suburbs of Harare]. The other large source of support is directed at individual student sponsorship of $100 000 a year, and the CFX Cricket Academy is indebted to their long-standing sponsors. There s both plenty of scope for new sponsors who are interested in supporting the development of cricket among the youth of Zimbabwe and gaps around the boundary for their advertising boundary boards!

For the last two years, students of the CFX Cricket Academy spent their winter attached to cricket clubs in the UK. This has proved to be an invaluable experience for the students who have come from diverse backgrounds. Candidates have been selected from all walks of life and from urban and rural centres. There have been representatives from Bulawayo, Chivhu, Chitungwiza, Gweru, Harare, Karoi, Mhangura, Norton, Ruwa and Selous, from both high-density and low-density areas.

Judging by the number of students who have been selected for both the national and the A sides, the principle of selecting students on merit has proved successful. The most recent CFX Cricket Academy ambassadors in the public eye include Mluleki Nkala, Douglas Marillier and Travis Friend. Since its inception the CFX Cricket Academy has been responsible for the training of seven students who have been selected for the national side and eleven for the A side.

The CFX Cricket Academy itself had played the England A side and New Zealand national side this year. This was both good experience for our students and an eye-opener for our visitors! Our major objective is to produce players of international calibre and also to promote the development of the game in the remotest corners of our country. We rely heavily on companies to sponsor cricket through us by student sponsorship, boundary board advertising and donations.

Gwynne Jones would add that the Academy is not there solely for the use of the sixteen students who are selected each year. He sees it as serving the interests of Zimbabwe cricket as a whole, and therefore any national players who have problems with their game should be able to come to seek advice from the coaches or other experts at the Academy. As an example, he says that if a player like Jason Gillespie needed to improve his batting skills to get into the Australian team he would go to the Academy in Australia while the module on batting was taking place for three or four weeks. If another player was struggling with his bowling in a state side, he too would be sent by his state side to the Academy to sort his problems out.

They are also setting up coaching courses during the school holidays for boys between the ages of nine and sixteen, while the Academy students themselves will develop their coaching skills, a vital part of their training, with these boys.

The pavilion is nearing completion and it is hoped that it will be finished by Christmas and certainly ready for when the Academy begins its third year at the start of February. A new road and car park have just been completed, and new enclosed grass nets are being constructed, exclusively for Academy and national use.

"Further forward, we have got to get into the areas of sports science and sports medicine," Gwynne says. "This will be the ideal venue to set up a Sports Science institute. We've already been in contact with the sports science issues in South Africa and contacted Professor Tim Noakes, who is very keen to help us set it up. Austin Jeanes is also working very hard to help set it up. We have to do this because we can't have another time when we send a team away and 30 per cent of them are injured, mainly the bowlers. No business could operate without 30 per cent of their employees working or with 30 per cent of their machines down. It's exactly the same with our national team; we have to look after our national team better than we're doing now from an injury point of view."

I jocularly suggested doing away with pre-match warm-ups, which have resulted in several players, including Heath Streak on two occasions, injuring themselves before a day's play during the past year. Gwynne suggested rather more comprehensive warm-ups, so they were preventing injuries rather than trying to fix them.

The announcement of next year's intake of students is imminent; Gwynne says they are just waiting for the convener of selectors, Iain Butchart, to attend a meeting during the coming week, and then the names will be confirmed. The current students have two further years of their contracts with the Zimbabwe Cricket Union to run, during which time they will be playing and coaching in the provinces. Many of them came from other provinces originally in any case, so for most of them it is just a case of returning to their home areas.

Manicaland is the province most in need. Gary Brent has been given permission to return to live in Harare, which left only two past students, Patrick Gada and Neil Ferreira, in Mutare, so four students will be sent to Mutare. Alec Taylor and Kingsley Went are both originally from Mutare, so they will be returning home, and will be joined there by Jason Young and Richard Sims, who both volunteered. They have been playing club cricket for Alexandra Sports Club and Old Hararians respectively, but have already started playing for their new province.

Midlands will gain Travis Friend, whose family still lives in the province, while John Vaughan-Davies has relatives there. Douglas Hondo expressed a wish to move out of Harare, so he will join them. `Syke' Nkala will be returning to Matabeleland, when he is not on call with the national side, as are Clement Mahachi and Ryan King.

In a year's time it is possible that students will be sent to the Masvingo-Lowveld area, where Nissan is keen to set up a centre of excellence, which will hopefully be arranged between them and the Zimbabwe Cricket Union. After that the Chinhoyi-Karoi area, northwest of Harare, where there is a number of good schools and a still strong farming community, is earmarked for further development.

Gwynne emphasizes that it is intended to incorporate into the curriculum at the Academy every area that will help the students become successful players at international level. "It isn't just coaching and physical training," he says, "but also the mental side. We try to get the right professional people to come in and do those courses. We have a nutritionalist and a sports psychologist and people who are dedicated to physical fitness. We give them courses as toastmasters, to become better public speakers, and work with media relations. We try to build them up so that after one year with the Academy they are very well equipped to become successful professional players in Zimbabwe.

No tours have been planned for the near future in Zimbabwe, but Gwynne feels it is very important that the players do go on tour, although the expense involved means that it cannot be every year. He is well aware that academies from other countries tour abroad, and feels that between them and the Zimbabwe Cricket Union they have to find the finances to make this possible. This year the Academy requires a $13 million budget, $9 million of which is the capital start-up, the building programme. Some of the money comes from ZCU, while the rest has to be raised through sponsorship, which is very difficult to find given the present economic situation in Zimbabwe.

The budget for 2001, when most of the building has been completed, will probably be only $5 million, of which CFX will put in $3.5 million. The remaining $1.5 will not be easy to find, and with inflation and devaluation the $5 million may yet grow. "The problem of running the academy with people with the correct expertise is difficult," he says. "There are people in the country who can help us but we need to employ them not just on an ad hoc, part-time basis, but on a much more committed basis. They need to be paid for it; we can't expect people to keep helping out without being paid.

"Most of our cricket equipment comes from outside the country," he continues. "A bat costing $20 000 this year will probably cost $30 000 next year. That's just one bat, and you can't expect the guys here to become good players with inferior equipment. All these things impinge on the quality we can offer."

Next week we plan to feature a biography of Gwynne Jones himself, who was a notable cricketer at just below first-class level in both Zimbabwe and England, and who might well have had a county career with Worcestershire had circumstances been more favourable.