The Maties men’s cricket team recently won their first-ever Varsity cricket tournament. We chatted with team captain Lehan Botha about what it means to the team, and the recipe for their success:
“Relief … joy … and just pure, pure satisfaction,” is how Maties cricket captain Lehan Botha describes the moment that Don Glover scored the winning runs (with an emphatic straight six) for Maties in the Varsity Cricket T20 final in Pretoria on 5 October 2022.
It was a tough tournament, with five matches played over three days in the blistering Highveld heat.
In the final match, North-West University looked set to post a formidable target at 118 without loss after 12 overs, but the Maties never gave up. “Stay in the fight” is a mantra that the team adopted throughout the tournament. And it worked. They tightened the screws to restrict Pukke to 161, and won the game by five wickets, with Botha carrying his bat in a consummate captain’s innings to lead Maties to their first ever victory in the tournament.
Botha puts the victory down to a great team culture. “We’ve tried to build an understanding of where people come from,” he says. “Whether it’s a guy who comes from a township in Cape Town, or a guy who comes from a suburb in Pretoria, everyone has their own story, their own stuff that they’re dealing with. And just trying to understand where they’re coming from, that’s been massive for me this year. It just makes my job as a captain a whole lot easier – to understand the person and not just the ability that they have on the field.”
A second-year BCom student at Stellenbosch University (SU), Botha is keenly aware that keeping a team focused and pulling in the same direction is as crucial to their success as the practice and fitness and strength conditioning.
“You get a lot of different people from lots of different places coming into one sports team,” he says. “And I think in that way, it resembles the University itself. I know we all have different personalities and different characters. But we all have the same goal. I mean, you get all the students working hard. Everyone’s here for a reason. And everyone can find the same common reason as someone else and just work together.”
It’s a culture that is instilled and supported by the Maties Sport management team, consisting of head coach Ryan Bailey, who puts in a lot of time with the players both individually and as a group while offering analysis and strategy; fitness coach Grant van Velden who is in charge of strength and conditioning; team psychologist Eugene Oppelt who advises on the team culture; and team manager Keegan van Aarde who makes sure that the team’s logistics and planning run smoothly. The team also has access to excellent physiotherapy treatment through Campus Health Service.
“The new indoor cricket facility at Paul Roos has been a game changer in terms of how we are able to train in the off-season,” Botha adds. “And we have access to the Maties high performance gym, which is world class and enables us to be the best athletes that we can be.”
The next tournament in the Maties cricket team’s sights is the University Sports South Africa (USSA) event happening in December.
With a significant win under their belts, Maties are going into the tournament with the confidence of a winning team and a culture that bodes very well – not just for the team, but for the future of SU and for South Africa as a whole.
Image: Maties Sport/Jamie Wyngaardt.
