In January of 2012, two of Cricket Peru‘s young stars, Ernesto Arrate and Santiago Chavez, attended the inaugural ICC Americas High Performance Camp in Buenos Aires. Both did very well and received good feedback from the ICC coaches involved.

Wendell Coppin, the ICC Americas Regional Development Officer and a highly-respected cricket coach, had this to say about Ernesto:

‘Activities

Worked on Alignment during the load up phase of his bowling action, his run up and follow through.  Driving through the bowling crease.  Arms rotation pathway, delivery release point.

Recommendations

Gradual acceleration of his run-up, maintain balance during his load-up by presenting the base of his palm to the batter and  keeping bowling arm with the ball  close to his chin and the non bowling arm driving up and forward to the target.

Ernesto also showed a big improvement with his batting during the generic sessions that everyone did, in fact he was our first “champagne moment”. He had spent two days doing drill work on the drive and in the nets on the second afternoon he played a perfect cover drive and just stood there smiling - he knew he had automatically repeated what he had been practicing.’

Andy Pick, ICC Americas High Performance Officer and former coach of England A, described Santiago as:

‘a raw young wicketkeeper but finds it very enjoyable and is keen to improve. A lot of the work we did was on the basics of head, hands and feet.

With his hands, we focused on presenting as big a catching area as possible, fingers pointing down or up depending on the path of the ball and getting them well out in front of him so he could watch the ball into the gloves and have space to absorb the pace of the ball. He occasionally got his hands tucked in close to his body and this affected his success rate of catching.

We looked at wherever possible moving laterally when stood back and did some lateral movement drills with a catch in the middle. Attention was paid to not crossing over his feet but rather clicking his heels together as he moved across, all the time keeping his backside up and his back straight. The latter couple of points were to keep his weight forward on the balls of his feet and not on his heels.

When stood up Santiago would position himself too far from the stumps so pretty much all the work done here was to keep him within touching distance of the stumps with his weight forward so he could remove the bails each time he took the ball. We brought in a shadow batter as the week went on, to make the practice more game-specific and used a chair when a batter was unavailable. The highlight for me was watching Santiago take a stumping in the match at Belgrano - a champagne moment.

A short note on his batting. He had a strange grip and a crab-like stance. During the course of the week we looked at changing the grip and getting him to stand up straighter with his knees flexed, this was more comfortable for him and allowed better alignment when it came to his backswing.’

Fitness:

In the fitness tests, ‘both performed very well in relation to the group: there is a definite link between fitness and performance and these two have an advantage in that department.’

Congratulations to both.

To read Ernesto’s report on the camp, click here.