Plans to give the Diamond Oval some ‘spit and polish’ under way

NORTHERN Cape Cricket (NCC) have picked an innovative idea to revitalise the idle assets of the provincial sports franchise in an effort to diversify the company’s revenue streams and thereby provide a financial booster to the senior and junior teams.

NCC CEO Thapelo January said they have initiated a joint venture agreement with two services suppliers to the franchise. The first of these is with Leon van Blerk, owner of Performance Sports Institute (PSI), a private sports performance company.

The other is Linda van Vrede, owner of Retreat and Weddings, a decor and executive catering company.

January said: “It was always our plan to revamp the place (Diamond Oval) and breathe some new life into it. We started off with Linda van Vrede and went into a partnership with her.

“She will use this space (at the back of the central office and reception area) to host weddings and conferences and the like. It is a way for the franchise to generate an income.

“We are diversifying our sources of income as we are a small franchise that plays in the second division. Given that situation money is not so easy to come by. We have to look into different ways of getting money into our coffers.

“Once we had concluded our contract with her (Van Vrede) and we saw how beneficial it is to the company, we then looked more into the unutilised spaces that the company possesses and thought what can we bring into Cassandra that will not just benefit the stadium but also the whole community of Cassandra where our facility is situated,” he added.

On-site training facilities

“This led us to thinking about our team (NC Heat XI) as well. We thought since we pay Virgin Active a monthly service fee for our professional players, how about we get someone from outside, who has the equipment but does not have the space, to come here and provide the service to us on-site so that we can stop paying over money to that side and rather put the money into our utilities here.

“In that way we would then have a gym available to ourselves around the clock. This deal excited our strength and conditioning coach and trainer a lot. They were very excited at this new venture as the machinery that Leon has here is world class,” January told the DFA.

“This facility would not only be available to the professional team itself but to the community and all our provincial teams that we have, such as the boys and ladies teams. Hopefully, by the time we go into the national (cricket) weeks in December the facility will be functional. The boys and girls will come for strength and conditioning training here and we won’t have to send them out to external service providers.

“The whole scheme will greatly benefit the community of Cassandra as well. As you can see Casandra is quite some distance from everything else in Kimberley. We plan to have the services available right here on their doorstep. This will eliminate unnecessary travel into the central business district for the same thing.”

As if that were not enough, January continued, “We're not going to stop here. We hope to involve several other businesses into the project as well. There is yet another idea to establish a sports shop on the Oval’s precinct. The plan is to bring more traffic here to breathe more life into the precinct. That way the more business opportunities we create for the people of Cassandra.

“We have space here that is idle that sits there and costs the company money because it deteriorates and we have to fix it and it goes back to being unused. Rather give it out to somebody who is going to use it and we make money from it,” he said.

Sports Development Agreement

Van Blerk of Performance Sports Institute (PSI) said the company entered into a sports development agreement with the cricket franchise. The registered sports company will help with juniors and female cricket development as well as provide high performance as well as generic sports development opportunities to sports instances not necessarily connected to cricket solely.

“Our facilities here will also be available for use by the general public for health and wellness in terms of the agreement with NC Cricket,” Van Blerk told the DFA.

He added that PSI will bring its own personnel to the deal. They will boost their staff complement to be used at the Diamond Oval with additional personnel from two universities. They were recruiting individuals who have recently graduated in sports development sciences from places such as the University of Free State and one other university still to be confirmed.

Van Blerk himself had been in the sports development business since 2009. He was first engaged as a premier league sports coach affiliated to Griquas rugby. However, he has been involved with school sports since 1999.

“We are pleased with this agreement,” Van Blerk said. “There is trust between us and we are excited to be involved. The exposure that comes with this deal is immense for us not simply monetarily but the scale of the exposure for us through NC Cricket is phenomenal.”

Bringing back the sparkle

Meanwhile, Van Vrede, who was busy with landscaping the proposed rose garden area inside the Diamond Oval precinct, said they now have a venue which was part of the country club. The plan was to bring back to sparkle to the garden and promote it as a premier venue for seminal commercial and private event hosting. The facility she was busy preparing will in all probability be ready to receive the public en masse sometime in January next year.

Wannie Engelbrecht, NC Cricket Services director, said the plan was to generate revenue to benefit cricket.

“If we can’t bring in revenue we can’t put out programmes for cricketers in the Northern Cape,” he said. “This is a win-win situation with Linda from Retreat and Leon from PSI. Whatever we get from aspects of the deal we can pump back into cricket development even going far down to the Under-13 squads level.”

Engelbrecht promised that there were a few other deals they had in the pipeline. However, he said that the plan was first to get the current ones bedded down before tackling the next project.