KENSINGTON’S long-awaited Senior Cup cricket triumph is the culmination of several successes off the field in recent years, says club President Wavell Hinds.

Kensington Cricket Club, located in east Kingston, lifted the Stewart’s Automotive-sponsored Michael Holding Senior Cup after claiming first-innings honours in the drawn two-day final against St Catherine CC at Ultimate ground in St Ann earlier this month.

It is Kensington’s first Senior Cup title since 2004, when Hinds, a former Jamaica and West Indies batsman, was the club captain.

Hinds told the Jamaica Observer that the club’s development objectives go well beyond winning titles.

“We took the decision as a club that we wanted to build better citizens for our society. We use cricket as the vehicle to do that social engineering and now we’re getting the rewards on the field. But off the field, we’ve been rewarded a lot of times… so it’s all coming together,” he said.

“In this [title-winning] squad we have about nine people attending tertiary institutions and about six who have completed their first degrees, and some are overseas doing their masters.

“We have a plethora of players who [have other roles]. Jamie Hay is the Under-15 coach of the Kensington team and Denneil Griffiths is the Under-15 manager. We use our same members who are playing Senior Cup to run the youth programme because we’re developing the full human being. So, we have certified coaches, and Jamie Hay and Griffiths are certified umpires, so we’re doing a lot of development within the game and outside of the game,” Hinds, also the president and chief executive officer of the West Indies Players’ Association (WIPA), outlined.

“We set out on this programme as early as 2017, starting with a youth programme, to build the whole human being. We had not seen a lot of success on the field partly because we were building and doing all the remedial work with the youngsters on the field and also in the classroom. We have had sessions to do with finance, medical, health, about money laundering — a whole plethora of things to educate our members,” he explained.

“Kensington is a family club and we’re looking to build everyone. We’re glad for the Senior Cup victory but we’ve been having smaller victories, more important victories off the field as it relates to each member of our club,” he emphasised.

Hinds has been Kensington president since 2020 and was the first vice-president in the five years before he assumed the top job, in which time he had been spearheading the cricket programme at the club.

He said the development successes have led to them having a deeper squad, with good-quality players in abundance.

“Our capacity at Kensington has built to a comfortable level where we can have people playing at different areas at different times without being worried about the squad,” he explained, noting the numerous Kensington players who have made their way to national junior and senior teams.