Former South African international and Indian world champion coach Gary Kirsten is on a mission

In Khayelitsha, the largest and fastest growing township in South Africa, around 450 boys and girls from the Eastern Cape now play cricket.

A decade ago this was largely impossible due to the lack of cricket facilities there. Unlike India, where informal cricket is played with a rubber ball and stick even in the poorest communities, football took center stage here.

When Gary Kirsten, former South Africa international and world champion coach with India, pondered what could be done in Khayelitsha, one thing became clear to him.

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

Madoda helped Kirsten understand how sports did or didn’t work in a place like Khayelitsha. During a tour of eight schools, Kirsten did not see a single sports facility, let alone cricket facilities.

In Khayelitsha alone there are about 50 tuition-free schools, each accommodating 1,000 or more children.

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

But that wasn’t enough.

“The next phase was the construction of a playground. At that point, they were playing games on a concrete surface on an outfield that resembled a beach,” says Kirsten. “It would be too expensive to plant grass because it would be too expensive to maintain. So we built an artificial field. It was a huge upfront cost (approx Rs 2.5 billion) but I was able to raise the money.”

This facility, set up at the Chris Hani School, included two playing fields, also artificial, in the middle. When this was done and up and running about two years ago, it got Kirsten thinking.

“The third phase was to build an indoor cricket center of excellence in a township school. I kept thinking why can’t children in townships have the same opportunities to play cricket as I did: equipment, good quality nets, a trainer… Why can’t we do that in a township?”

When this was built Chris Hani became a center of excellence not just limited to its students but serving all schools in the area. Out of this, the best of the best would go into a high-performance program and receive special attention.

One of the key things that made the program work was the community. Simply building an expensive field in the middle of a township would not work. It required approval from the schools and community, who were responsible for protecting the infrastructure created. Kirsten could have simply put his name to a project or two with his profile, or narrowed his role to fundraising, but he felt the need to take it a step further. “I have made some commitments to Mr. Madoda and if you are true to your word, you must keep it. You can’t just go around saying we want to do this and that without actually executing the vision.” Even raising funds is not easy in the current financial climate and it costs around 60 lakh every year just to keep things going to keep.

Kirsten admits that his time in India opened his eyes to what’s possible. “I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the poorer parts of India when the opportunity arose,” he says. “It’s not easy, because then you get recognized and it gets chaotic. But I learned a lot from these experiences. The similarity between India and South Africa is that there are many ways to make a difference if you think it through and implement a program carefully.”

Kirsten hopes that programs like this will, over time, allow black Africans in the townships to make it to the top without having to rely solely on scholarships from fancy schools. The school system in South Africa is robust and scholarships work, but there are not enough and even these are not guaranteed. “To say that a black African cricketer can only make it to the top on a scholarship is counterproductive,” says Kirsten.

“Many scholarship recipients are not able to fulfill their potential because they are removed from their community and home and the environment at these fancy schools is just too difficult to adapt. When Lungi Ngidi (who went to Hilton on a scholarship) speaks of it, you can feel it through his bones. Ngidi says: “I can’t tell you how difficult it was. The only thing that got me through was feeling equal to everyone else on the cricket pitch.’”

Bringing excellence to townships is one way to change that.