16 year old Tiann Pretorius is part of Canada’s U19 squad, and was profiled by Andy Prest for the North Shore News:-
North Vancouver’s Tiaan Pretorius is on his way to Toronto where he’ll be gunning for a spot with the rest of Team Canada in the 2018 U19 Cricket World Cup.
The 16-year-old, who just finished up Grade 10 at Handsworth Secondary where he played running back for the senior football team, is the youngest player on the national U19 cricket team, a squad that will be playing against Bermuda and the United States with one World Cup berth on the line.
So how did a football-playing kid from noted non-cricket-playing North Vancouver end up as one of the best young cricket bowlers in North America? …
His family moved here [Vancouver], however, when he was 12 years old, causing some stress for the budding cricket star.
“At first I was nervous, I didn’t think I was going to have any friends. It was a new country, everything was new,” he says.
He soon started to make a name for himself at the West Vancouver Cricket Club, although it wasn’t a smashing success right from the start. The team was near the bottom of the second division of the British Columbia Mainland Cricket League when he first started playing.
“I started out playing for the worst team in the league,” he says. He also had to navigate an interesting cultural mix amongst players predominantly of Indian or Pakistani heritage. That has involved picking up bits and pieces of new languages, including Hindi and Tamil.
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