Katandra West Primary School installs synthetic cricket pitch, ditching narrow old wicket for wide and wonderful new deck

By Liam Nash

Oct 16, 2024

Katandra youngsters Maddox Ireland, Cooper Osmond, Parker Osmond and Harvey Lawn standing on the new wicket.

After waiting, excavating and placating, Katandra Cricket Club has been bowled over by its new wicket.

The club has dropped a brand spanking new synthetic pitch into the middle at Katandra West Primary School, leaving behind sour memories of a tiny track that simply wasn’t up to scratch.

Following a successful $4168.35 grant through Cricket Victoria’s Australian Cricket Infrastructure Fund, the Eagles matched the figure and launched a project for the betterment of the club and cricket in the town.

Now, the stunning new deck is nearly ready for its first delivery.

A brand new synthetic wicket stands proudly in the middle of the oval at Katandra West Primary School.

Katandra Cricket Club president Sam Smith explained the reasoning behind upgrading the wicket.

“Essentially, it was years of playing on a s**t wicket,” he said.

“We had a plan in place a few years ago, but it didn’t come to fruition and we were waiting for the perfect platform to get the money and get the help from Cricket Victoria.

“We definitely didn’t do it in halves, we went the maximum that we could — that’s the biggest wicket you can get.”

The old pitch was extremely narrow, spanning 2.1m in width and only allowing for a 2.8m run up at each end.

The upgraded wicket aligns with Australian Cricket standards and is 2.8m wide, 28m long with a 3m run up at either end.

The original wicket with an outline of the new synthetic install.

However, its narrow confines weren’t the only curious thing about the old deck.

Once it was excavated Smith did some digging of his own and made somewhat of a groundbreaking discovery.

“It’s got a lot of history, that wicket,” he said.

“When we were digging it up, we found another pitch underneath it — it was 200mm thick.

“I dug a bit further into the research of it and when the school put the dam in at the back, it made the school oval a little bit less.

“The cricket pitch was a bit close to the dam at the back to water the school with, so a couple of local farmers brought four-wheel drive tractors and hooked the chains up to the pitch and actually dragged the pitch over the oval and further towards the road to get it more centralised.

“That was a bit of mission for them and that was in the early ’70s I think.”

The Katandra West Primary School venue is mainly used by the Eagles’ youth and E-grade sides, with Smith noting it “will be an absolute blessing to play on it now”.

Final touch-ups are being made with grass growing around the perimeter of the wicket, but once in action, there is no shortage of positives stemming from it.

“We’ll definitely get a lot more home games, that’s for sure, because we’ve got a quality pitch,” Smith said.

“We tend to get shied away from through the league because we weren’t up to standard, so now that we are, it’s going to be 100 per cent better.

“And the junior teams will play on a bigger pitch where if they do bowl a half decent wide, it’s not going to land off the pitch, so they won’t be deterred as much when they’re actually playing.

“We do have a few females who do play in our junior sides and it’s just going to draw more girls, more kids, more senior people out to the club. It’s going to be really good.”