CWI looking to use the skills of non-certified coaches in its development programmes

There are many persons in the Caribbean who have the abilities to encourage young persons to train, and those who also have the specialized skill sets to develop players as batsmen, bowlers, and as wicket-keepers, but they are not certified. However, Cricket West Indies (CWI),is looking at incorporating some of these individuals into its fold to assist in technical tasks.

Explaining to SEARCHLIGHT how they plan to do this, Director of Cricket with CWI, Miles Bascombe, said, “What we want is that capacity to impact players and to influence them positively to help them to develop their skills”.

He outlined that, “One of the issues that we’ve had is that while we’ve had many certification programmes, we have quite a number of coaches who have not been certified and do have that ability … to impact our players positively. So what we want to do at CWI is to have a coaching development which recognizes the coaches who are able to impact players, and also have a certification, build on top of that … a certification programme that ensures that the coaches that we do certify are able to do exactly what we have certified them to do.”

Bascombe pointed out that Cricket West Indies also has plans to address underperformance among certified coaches “to make them more accountable, aimed at improving the quality of West Indies cricket at all levels”.

“We have to leverage our territorial boards. CWI definitely cannot engage all of these coaches. It depends on the programmes that are local to these territories. What we have done is that we have engaged a coaching development consultant who is currently working on developing a framework, a strategy for coaching development across the region,” Bascombe said in an interview following the three game series against Bangladesh at Arnos Vale last December.