How to Find Talent - and Develop Skills

The extraordinary story of Gary Kirsten's Khayelitsha Dream

The smell of braaing meat on the side of the road was intense. It was late afternoon so the informal vendors had started preparing for the return of those residents lucky enough to have jobs in Cape Town, at least an hour away although many are forced to spend much longer on their commute which can cost them a quarter of their daily wage.

A hungry worker can buy meat and pap for R15 but a bowl of pap and the dripping from the meat can cost as little as half of that. There is little money in Khayelitsha but it goes further here than in most places.

The Chris Hani Secondary School is an unprepossessing, two-story building with the usual spiked metal fences and a few coils of barbed wire to deter opportunistic thieves – but not vandalism. There are very few signs of that. The grounds are mostly dusty, the grass having long been trodden away by the 1400 or so pupils.

It’s only when you walk behind the main buildings that you see what makes this township school so profoundly different to any other in the Western Cape. A cricket field in immaculate condition – perfect because the entire expanse, including outfield, is astroturf, not just the pitches in the middle. This is the home of the CATCH Trust cricket project, formerly the Gary Kirsten Foundation.

Now in its eleventh year, the results have been astonishing. This year the CATCH Trust sent no less than 37 cricketers to the Western Province Trials and an astonishing 18 were selected to represent WP or Boland in their respective age groups. Even more remarkable is that, last year, the CATCH Trust had one player in the Western Province boys under-19 team which played at the Khaya Majola week, batsman Unathi Magoloza (pictured below).

The numbers are astonishing for a private initiative which started without any backing or funding from CSA or national government. Now the Trust receives an annual subsidy of around R850k from the Ministry of Sports, Arts and Culture which is about 25% of the running costs. It covers the salaries of the many coaches.

Kirsten’s favourite motto is: “Talent is universal, opportunity is not.” Just like Nono Pongolo and Lungi Ngidi in my two previous columns, he is instinctively unhappy with the notion of private schools picking a couple of under-privileged cricketers each year for scholarships or bursaries. At the age of 13.

“Some of our best cricketers weren’t even playing at 13,” he says with rare Kirsten animation. “The point is to provide an opportunity to as many kids as possible, widen the net with facilities that make the game enjoyable. Government schools can’t afford ground staff and irrigation, they can barely pay their teachers, but now everyone can try their hand at cricket.”

The outfield cost a whopping R5.5 million, a sum raised by Kirsten through his profile and friendship with businessman Rick Garrett and his company, HomeChoice. But he always put a time limit on the Foundation’s name before it needed to stand on its own feet and form a reputation and legacy not directly associated with him.

“My name and contacts certainly helped but it is about so much more than me. The coaches and teachers who run the project deserve to be recognised, they don’t work for me. If anything, I work for them now,” Kirsten says without obvious self-deprecation.

Kirsten started his own Coaching Academy over a decade ago as well as an online coaching education platform – ‘CoachED’ – which has also enjoyed remarkable success with over 2500 coaches having participated around the world. Two graduates from this course (Ryan ten Doeschate and Morne Morkel) were part of Team India’s backroom staff which recently won the Champions Trophy. At least ten more are coaching internationally, everywhere from Oman to Hungary, the Netherlands and Guyana, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe.

It is little wonder that the coaches at the CATCH Trust are also producing so much talent.

Back in 2019 Kirsten and his team undertook a project so ambitious that many advised him against it – a tour of England with a squad of under-13 boys of whom some had never left Khayelitsha and most did not have a passport. Just leaving Cape Town and South Africa was a logistical challenge which still makes him laugh and shudder in equal measure but the benefits are still being felt today. There are photographs from the tour on the walls of the three-lane indoor school next to the playing field which inspire the next generation of kids to dream. Magoloza was on that tour…and five others made provincial teams this year.

And guess what? The lost only one of the four matches they played including victory against Weybridge Cricket Club and a thrilling last ball tie against the prestigious, private school, Magdalene College School in Oxford.

These days the CATCH Trust has approximately 400 kids and runs boys and girls teams all the way from under-6 to under-19.

“There are plenty of people who talk about the ‘untapped’ talent in this country without, perhaps, ever having seen it,” Kirsten says. He doesn’t need to add “…they could just pay us a visit.” The 101-Test veteran was instrumental in forming ties with a host of kit suppliers and numerous touring teams to Cape Town have been only too happy to leave their own bats, gloves and pads behind in Khayelitsha.

They are not ‘name brands’ and, like the meat on the braais, they are not the cuts you will find in up-market supermarkets. But just as the adults of the township make the best of the rest, the kids at the CATCH Trust are succeeding with what they have. And if you’re wondering how they adapt from playing and learning the game exclusively on artificial surfaces to turf pitches and grass outfields…it’s amazing how versatile young people can be if they’re told that anything is possible. And nothing impossible.

• There will be more on the Catch TRUST to come on this page. It is an inspiration.