Dinesha Devnarain on impact of Schools SA20 championship

This comes as the 2024/2025 Schools SA20 season nears the semi-finals stage, potentially introducing new talent to the domestic league and the national team.

Speaking to SABC Sport, Devnarain says the Schools SA20 championships has already played a key part in the national team’s preparation for the ICC U19 Women’s World Cup.

"I think it is massive, it plays an imperative role in making sure that these girls are playing cricket all year round, not just as seasons. So, the coaching that they get in schools, the amount of games that they get in schools, also aided by club cricket and obviously the domestic league as well helps,” Devnarain said.

“The competitiveness of the under19 national team it keeps up the level of competitiveness and the brand of cricket that we want to play entirely the more cricket that the girls are playing the better.

“I know in that obviously there's the SA20 schools competition, which aids in the process; it's massive. I think all of those aids and contributes to the success of the team making the final.

“Obviously now we've got to go back to the drawing board and see how can we better the system. What are the things that are crucial, what are the things that we want to maintain but yeah, just the importance of schools’ cricket and the domestic league is paramount.

“It's imperative that they exist and co-exist to make sure that we have a winning national under19 team."

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Devnarain says the main focus is to develop talent at domestic level to help build a solid national team, as they aim to become champions of the next T20 World Cup in 2027.

"We want to create match-winning Proteas. We started in 2023, we got better in 2025, and we got into the final. We do wanna win a World Cup, so from a development point of view, we are definitely competing to win World Cups at that age group,” she added. “The focus remains the same, we wanna contribute to the Proteas women's team and that's about creating match winners for the country.

“Domestically it's to know that these young girls, our next generation, I'd like to call them the modern cricketers and that's where the focus is to invest in the 2023 group, 2025 group and keep making sure that we hold them to a standard and a certain culture that allows them to play this cricket."