Former South Africa international and India’s World Cup winning coach Gary Kirsten is on a mission

A decade ago, this was largely impossible, for there were no cricket facilities there. Unlike India, where informal cricket happens with a rubber ball and a stick in even the poorest communities, this was football central.

When Gary Kirsten, the former South Africa international and World Cup winning coach with India, set out to understand what could be done in Khayelitsha, he realised one thing immediately.

“I visited a school on the eastern side, the Chris Hani High School and met the headmaster, Madoda Mahlutshana, who has since become a good friend,” Kirsten tells ET Sport. “I was immediately impressed with his leadership. He took the school from a 40% matriculation pass rate to 90% in a few years. It was a great story of quality leadership in an impoverished environment.”

Madoda helped Kirsten understand how sport worked or didn’t, in a place such as Khayelitsha. During a tour of eight schools, Kirsten didn’t see a single sporting facility, leave alone cricket facilities.

In Khayelitsha alone, there are about 50 schools where students don’t pay fees and each of these is home to 1,000 or more children.

As a starting point, Kirsten decided to personally fund the construction of cricket nets in one school. He then went out and raised funds to have nets put in at five more schools. The Gary Kirsten Foundation identified coaches who would spend a few hours each day at these schools and paid them a salary.

But, this was not enough.

“The next phase was to build a playing facility. At that point they were playing matches on a concrete laid surface on an outfield that resembled a beach,” says Kirsten. “It was going to be too expensive to put in grass because the maintenance of that would be too expensive. So we built an artificial field. It was a huge upfront cost (Rs 2.5 crore approximately) but I was able to raise the money.”

This facility put in place at the Chris Hani School included two centre pitches, also artificial. Once this was done and began to be used, about two years ago, it set Kirsten thinking.

“The third phase was to build an indoor cricket centre of excellence in a township school. I kept thinking, why can’t township kids have the same kind of opportunity to play cricket that I had: equipment, quality nets, a coach … Why can’t we create that in a township?”

When that was built, Chris Hani became a centre of excellence, and was not limited to its students alone, but serviced all the schools in the region. From this, the best of the best would go into a high-performance programme and get specialised attention.

One of the critical things for the programme to work was community. Just building an expensive field in the middle of a township wouldn’t work. It needed buy-in from the schools and the community, who were responsible for protecting the infrastructure that had been created. Kirsten, with his profile, could’ve simply lent his name to a project or two, or restricted his role to fundraising, but he felt the need to go the extra mile. “I made some commitments to Mr Madoda and if you’re true to your word you have to honour it. You can’t just walk around saying we want to do this and that without actually delivering on the vision.” Even raising funds is not easy in the current financial climate, and it costs about `60 lakh each year just to keep things running.

Kirsten admits that his time in India did open his eyes to what was possible. “I spent a fair amount of time in the poorer environments in India when the chance came,” he says. “It’s not easy, because then you get recognised and it gets chaotic. But I took a lot out of those experiences. The similarity between India and South Africa is that there is a lot of opportunity to do something to make a difference if you think it through and implement a programme carefully.”

Kirsten hopes that, in time, programmes such as this will make it possible for black Africans in the townships to make it to the top without having to rely only on getting scholarships from fancy schools. The schools system in South Africa is robust, and scholarships work, but there are too few and even these come with no guarantees. “To say the only way a black African cricketer can make it to the top is through a scholarship is counter-productive,” says Kirsten.

“A lot of scholarship kids aren’t able to fulfil their potential because they are removed from their community, their homes and the environment at these fancy schools is just too difficult to fit into. When Lungi Ngidi (who went to Hilton on scholarship) talks about this, you can feel it coming through his bones. Ngidi says, ‘I can’t tell you how difficult it was. The only thing that got me through was that I felt equal to everyone else when I was on the cricket field.’”

Taking excellence to townships is one way to change this.