Jimmy Adams, Cricket West Indies’ Director of Cricket believes that in order to change the fortunes of the Caribbean unit there must be a higher standard of coaching to absorb the void created over the last 15 years.
During an interview on Mason and Guest recently, the former West Indies captain argued that there is a vast difference in the development of young cricketers during his era as compared to now.
“I do believe the informal club structure taught me the game by putting me in an environment with first-class and test cricketers from when I was a young teenager [and] where I was able to learn the trade in an environment that pushed me because of the standard that existed at club level, that is gone forever,” he stated.
As a consequence, Adams reasoned that the responsibility is now on the boots of the coaches to perform that aspect of development.
“The responsibility is on us now formally to teach that. We can’t think that it is going to happen and we can’t wait for a school system or non-existent club system to do it anymore and I think therefore maybe the only piece of the puzzle but for me a big piece of the puzzle is moving away from a club centric view of teaching the game to a coaching centric view,” the Jamaican explained.
He dug deeper into his argument by explaining that the coaching centric view would involve having a system under which the coaches can operate, free from the politics of the game and having the best coaches in the territories working with the best players in that territory with a uniformed plan.
Adams warned that if the West Indies does not find a solution it stood the risk of continuing putting young players to learn the trade at the highest level under immense pressure which often times do not prove successful. The Director of Cricket said that presently a lot of criticism comes in relation to a gap in different departments.
“So take any situation, any gap that you see at the international level, you say there is a gap with our batting in this area or bowling in this area or whatever and I say okay fine, do we have a system where we are teaching, we are introducing it at 15, we follow through at 17, we embed it at 19 and then we make sure that from 19 to 23 they know when to use that skill and how to use it and we don’t have that at the minute,” Adams admitted.
“However, we have started looking rigorously at the standard of our coaching, right down the coaching pathways because I firmly believe that if we don’t raise the standard and quality of our coaches, the coaches are now going to have to do what the clubs did 15 years ago.”
