TEN members of Rockingham Country Cricket Club in Yorkshire, United Kingdom, will travel to Zimbabwe in November, bringing almost 400kg of cricket and educational equipment for St Aidans Primary School in Chitungwiza.
The group will spend time at the school, play cricket matches and hand over equipment collected by club members throughout the year.
The donation includes cricket bats, pads, gloves, balls, helmets and clothing, along with laptops and tablets.
Rockingham’s Richard Skipworth, better known in cricket circles as “Skip”, said St Aidans headmaster Augustine Mupfumira and coach Malcom Chikuwha would receive the equipment on behalf of the school.
“We are also excited to deliver some top quality bats to the Rockingham CCC scholarship boys and the other CJPL schools,” Skipworth said.
His son, Callum, has also played a part in getting the equipment to Zimbabwe, raising £1,000 through three charity runs.
“I’m a very proud Dad!” Skipworth said.
Behind the donation is a relationship stretching back nearly a decade, built through Zimbabwean players who spent time playing club cricket in Yorkshire.
Rockingham, who compete in the South Yorkshire Cricket League, signed former Rising Stars head coach Stuart Matsikenyeri as a professional player in 2017.
Matsikenyeri later helped arrange opportunities for young Zimbabwean cricketers to spend their summers at the club. Tony Munyonga played for Rockingham in 2019, while Wessly Madhevere was expected to follow in 2020 before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted those plans.
Both players had attended St Aidans Primary School.
That connection eventually brought Rockingham members to Chitungwiza in early 2020. What they found was a school with promising young cricketers but little equipment and few facilities for them to practise.
Back in Yorkshire, club members began sponsoring the St Aidans cricket team.
The arrangement has since developed into a wider schools cricket programme, reaching children who previously had few opportunities to play the game.
Rockingham now pays school fees for former St Aidans pupils who continue their education and cricket at Churchill High School.
The club also runs the Chitungwiza Junior Premier League (CJPL) from the UK. The competition started with five primary schools and had expanded to seven by 2023, including schools where cricket had not previously been played.
Getting those schools equipped has meant more than sending bats and balls.
Rockingham has supplied practice frames and nets to primary schools that prepared concrete practice surfaces, giving pupils somewhere to train regularly.
The club has also helped train coaches to work alongside Chikuwha and Kuda Chigurupate of Zengeza 4, who are both contracted by Zimbabwe Cricket.
Those additional coaches now work with pupils at Dudzai, Chinembiri, Fungisai and Bright Daisies primary schools.
Dudzai offers one example of what the extra support has meant. The school went through the 2022 CJPL season without winning a match. After receiving a practice net, it finished third among seven teams in 2023.
The work has not been confined to cricket.
Rockingham has donated laptops and other educational equipment to St Aidans and arranged a pen-pal exchange linking 60 pupils with children at a school of the same name in Huddersfield, UK.
The exchange has given pupils in Chitungwiza and Yorkshire an opportunity to learn about each other’s lives beyond the cricket field.
Speaking to The Standard Sport in 2023, Skipworth said he believed Chitungwiza had enough cricketing talent to produce more players for Zimbabwe’s national team.
“The untapped cricketing talent in the town is incredible and we firmly believe that cricket in Chitungwiza will continue to grow at pace,” he said.
