Earlier this year I was part of a panel discussion on sports transformation on a news channel and I was firmly, and correctly, put in my place by Cricket SA chief executive Haroon Lorgat when I said the major sports federations are guilty of imposing racial quotas on representative teams at the top levels without doing anything to grow their game at grassroots level.
He pointed out that CSA’s mini-cricket programme does run a mass participation programme, at primary school level, and throughout the country.
The great work done in the Bakers Mini-Cricket programme and its successor, KFC Mini-Cricket, had slipped my mind at that moment, but I have been very aware of it for many years, and have reported on its activities in these pages regularly.
One of my treasured reporting memories is the day I spent in the company of the late Hansie Cronje, Imtiaz Patel - then with the Gauteng Cricket Board (GCB) - and a representative of Supa Quick, who sponsored the initiative.
We went to Soweto and Alex to hand out mini-cricket sets to schools and I’ll never forget how gracious Cronje was - enduring the numerous embraces of the (mostly female) mini-cricket coaches and bowling to the players in the little games they put on for us.
He also signed his name, thousands of times, on shirts, paper and, when we stopped off at a school in Lenasia, on a mountain of cricket bats.
That was in 1996 and mini-cricket was big then. It’s huge now.
If I needed reminding, I got it last weekend when I went along to the Gauteng KFC Mini-Cricket provincial festival at Redhill School.
There are similar festivals throughout the season in the main centres and they are, I’m told, always well-attended.
The Redhill one certainly was. There were 1 400 kids there, they said, and it was a noisy riot of colour, with so much energy being be used up that I had to take a seat to catch my breath at one stage.
There were a number of Gauteng Strikers players there, all of them brilliant in the way they interacted with the kids, as well as representatives from the Gauteng women’s cricket team.
And, there to make some order of the heaving mass of little players, were the coaches - teachers and volunteers, many of them women, along with some pretty professional-looking GCB coaches and officials running things.
And around the outside of the field, the parents, camping out, picnicking and forced to scream to be heard above the squeals of the players.
No one could come away from there believing that cricket is a whites-only sport in this country, or that nothing’s being done to spread the word among the six to 10-year-olds.
It was uplifting, but also a bit sad, because I had to wonder what happens to that horde when they get older, and why do we not have enough players of colour progressing from those ranks to make demographically selected teams at senior levels a natural, organic process.
At age 10 soft-ball mini-cricket is replaced by the proper game. Then you need bats, protective clothing and wickets. You can’t have 1 400 children playing on two soccer fields like they did last Saturday. In fact, that paddock at Redhill is home to just one cricket field, and 22 players at a time.
There’s the answer, cricket is expensive, it requires expert coaching, specialised equipment and dedicated fields.
To make it a “people’s game” is a lot more difficult than it sounds, and it’s hard to choose demographically representative “people’s teams” when the people aren’t playing the game in significant numbers.
That said, the KFC Mini-Cricket people are doing great things down at the base of the player pyramid.
Yes, you do have a mass-participation development programme at entry level, Mr Lorgat, and it’s fantastic.
Inependent Media