The Hauraki Plains College first XI cricket team “stepped up” this season to defend the Waikato Secondary School Boys Division 1 title.
The team triumphed over St Paul’s Collegiate School from Hamilton on home turf on April 1 scoring the school’s second win in the division’s history.
Coach Waynne Dodunski told The Profile the squad had taken “a bit of a hammering” by their final opponents in the opening match of the season in February but it bowled them a benchmark to be competitive.
“To be fair we weren’t that much of a batting squad although we had some real highlights through batting, we were a really good bowling and fielding unit and so we actually played to our strengths,” he said.
“We had some guys who had performed ok previously but they really stepped up this season, and we had some really great captaincy from Cooper Green.
“We [also] saw other teams having some on field coaching but our guys were able to make decisions off their own bat and to be able to actually bring that to the for was great to see that development in them.”
Waynne said another star player this season was Trent Ball who topped the batting list with 303 runs over the eight matches in the season including 157 runs in one match.
The team of 11, who were all between year 11 and 12, were “pretty stoked” to defend the title, he said.
“With some new blood in the team we weren’t expecting to be able to [achieve first] but that was our goal, so to be able to achieve that they were pretty happy about that,” he said. “There were some players who lived over the hill in Tairua and for them to stump up every week was pretty tough on them, a fair amount of travel particularly when we had games away in Hamilton. “We hope that the team will stick together, some of the guys have left school, but we’ll regroup in the coming season and try to build to defend our title again.”
