Visit Of Conrad Hunte To Zimbabwe (20 Feb 1997)

VISIT OF CONRAD HUNTE TO ZIMBABWE

20 February 1997

The former West Indian opening batsman, Conrad Hunte, is now the national development coach of the United Cricket Board of South Africa. He is currently in Zimbabwe at the invitation of the Zimbabwe Cricket Union to look at the local development programme and advise where necessary. A press conference was held at Harare Sports Club today, when ZCU president Peter Chingoka and chief executive Don Arnott introduced him to the local press.

Mr Hunte was full of praise for the quality of the Zimbabwean programme. After visiting Chitungwiza, the Harare equivalent of Soweto, and several other townships, he declared that the quality of the Under-12 cricketers he had seen there was the equal of anything in South Africa. He stressed the importance of ensuring that these young players were kept in the game through high school years and into club cricket, a problem that the ZCU is already trying to tackle.

Mr Hunte, relaxed and jovial, spent some time talking about the progress made by the development schemes in the eleven South African cricketing provinces, many of them aided by the type of sponsorship not currently available in Zimbabwe. He named Paul Adams and Mackay Ntini, of Border, as two players to have benefited from the programmes.

Before the meeting, Mr Arnott revealed that the Zimbabwean cricketers, on their recent tour to South Africa, had bought out of their own pockets a large amount of junior kit for the development programme, and donated it to the ZCU.