World Cups & spots in franchise leagues the goal for Namibia’s new women’s national coach

Following on from a number of positive recent developments, South African Francois van der Merwe has been appointed as the Namibia Women’s National Head coach, it was announced today.

“The vision for the National team is to qualify for all major ICC tournaments and to develop the National players where they can get contracts in various T20 leagues all over the world,” the 44-year-old said.

After making his List A playing debut in 1996 and First class debut in 2000 for South Africa’s North West Dragons, van der Merwe went on to start his coaching career in 2011 when he was appointed as the Dragons’ women’s team head coach. The CSA Level 3 coach guided the Dragons for eight years, winning eight trophies across 50 over and T20 formats. In the 2018-2019 season, the Dragons team went undefeated through the season and are the current National 50 over champions. 

During 2018 van der Merwe became the head coach of the SA Emerging team in a tri-series against England and Australia, and was also the coach of the National women’s academy at the High Performance Centre in Pretoria. 

According to Cricket Namibia’s release, van der Merwe’s focus is to promote girls and women’s cricket in all regions of Namibia, and to put structures in place to have a pipeline for all age groups to ultimately feed the National team. 

Van der Merwe also stressed the importance to grow the love for the game through mass participation, and for young players to ultimately progress from soft ball cricket into hard ball cricket. 

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