In an attempt to make school cricket more meaningful, the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) is planning to introduce scholarship programmes in the upcoming school cricket tournament this year.
Following the Covid-19 outbreak, the school cricket remained halted for the past two years. However, the board is hoping to arrange the tournament on a bigger scale this season.The board officials have already visited various venues for the upcoming school cricket tournament and according to the BCB’s Age-Group tournament committee chairman Obeid Rashid Nizam, the board is planning to introduce prize money for the upcoming tournament, slated to begin from next month.
“If we want the school cricket to reach new heights, we need to take a lot of initiatives so that those school cricketers can have a pathway to enter into the national level. Suppose if we can give scholarships to talented cricketers and have prize money for the champions and runners-ups, it will certainly add some value and colour to the tournament,” said Obeid.Each year over five hundred schools take part in the BCB’s school cricket tournament from which the winners get promoted to district and division levels and from there players are selected for the national level.
After the final round, the selected cricketers get the opportunity to practise under the BCB’s training programme.
“To make the school cricket festival more interesting, we need to make it institutional from where new players can be included in the national stage. To keep the talented players in the training we are planning to introduce a scholarship programme. We are planning to give a minimum salary wage for the top ten talented players from the tournament. Apart from that we are also planning to give prize money to the champion and runners up as well and I hope the board will approve those in the coming days,” he said. To make the national school cricket more fruitful and diverse, the board is all set to introduce the database of every player digitally. A total of 556 schools took part in the 2019 school cricket tournament but this time it has been reduced to nearly four hundred schools.
“The schools which are more focused on emphasising sports activities only those will be given the preference this time around. With the help of district and divisional coaches, we will try to select players for the schools to prepare the team. The board will be involved in the entire process,” said Obeid.
