Cricket match.

Sport plays a large part in our schools daily life and several sports codes are on offer. For the boys there is cricket, rugby, hockey, tennis and swimming, the girls have netball, hockey, tennis and swimming. The coaching is done by teachers after school hours and on Saturdays, there is no extra remuneration  for these activities, yet all do it happily and every one is involved. Yours truly is excused as I have to keep the library open after hours.  


In the 3rd term, July to September, we also have athletics.  


Apart from sport our extracurricular and co-curricular activities include, chess, speech and drama, school plays, girl guides and a writing club to promote budding authors. Every year a collection of stories, poems, etc is published in book form by Insini Press publishers. I'll write more about this in a later post.

Cricket is a favourite amongst the boys. Here our under 13 team is playing against the under 13 team from Winterton primary school. Winterton is a small agricultural village about 30km  from us. In this photo one of our bowlers is bowling to one of their batsmen.

A Winterton batsman playing the ball with our wicket keeper behind the wicket. Our cricket pitch is of a very high standard, with a base of termite mound soil, special grass that is mowed very short and rolled with a very heavy roller regularly. 

Another of our bowlers bowling from the opposite end. For those not so clued up on cricket, after every 6 balls, (what's known as an over), everyone, except the batsmen, change sides. This bowler has a beautiful bowling style, whole body square on to the batsman and bowling arm following through. Click on the picture to enlarge and you will see the ball where it has just left his hand, just to the right of his head. 


Note that the seam of the ball is vertical, which means that the seam will make contact with the face of the bat and not the smooth leather face of the ball. This means that the batsman has less control of the direction of the ball after it leaves the bat, you could say the bowler is in control.  


Very happy to inform you that we won this match convincingly. Winterton has been doing so well this season that the local paper called them un-stopable. Well we stopped them


Umpiring on this end is our under 13 coach, Charles Cassura, also our IT teacher. Charles asked me to come and take some photos to be put in our local newspaper. 


Charles is ex Zimbabwean and we have four of his compatriots teaching at our school. When Mugabe came to power he emphasized education and the training of teachers. Later he realized that a well educated people don't go well with dictatorship so he started harassing teachers. So many of them packed up and left. Zimbabwe's loss is our gain.