Sports club in regional areas face many challenges to stay afloat and keep player numbers at sustainable levels. But one competition in the New South Wales Snowy Mountains is batting above its average, thanks to passionate group of migrants who moved to the region for the Snowy 2.0 Project.
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00:00Since he can remember, Mirza Zeeshan has been crazy about cricket. In his birth country
00:10of Pakistan, he wasn't alone.
00:13Everybody loves cricket. Every street, every playground, everywhere. Kids, older people,
00:18everybody, they just play cricket.
00:20When he moved to the New South Wales Snowy Mountains in 2023, the familiar sight of a
00:25bat and ball made Mr Zeeshan feel at home.
00:28Last week, I came here, I saw a cricket match, I said wow. It just wakes up a lot of things
00:37from the past.
00:38Hundreds of migrant worker families have relocated to Cooma in recent years to work on the Snowy
00:432.0 project.
00:44People are coming from around the world and that's why we have a lot of players registered
00:49here.
00:50With fresh faces in town, a new local team has formed, the Cooma Titans, comprised of
00:56mostly Indian and Pakistani players.
01:00The team are tough competition.
01:02Even when it was minus three, minus four, you could walk past one of the ovals in town
01:08and they were playing cricket and they played all winter. It's been quite infectious the
01:11way they love cricket.
01:13The Cooma Titans are one of seven cricket clubs to form in New South Wales this season.
01:19In its latest census, Cricket Australia has acknowledged challenges faced by sports clubs
01:24listing the retention of players as a priority.
01:27We're kind of bucking the trend a little bit in country areas.
01:31The Monaro District Cricket Association has not seen a new team join its ranks in decades
01:36until this season when the Cooma Titans signed up.
01:39Members of the cricket community here in the Alpine region say that the team have brought
01:42an additional level of skill to the game.
01:45Some of their batters are very big hitters.
01:48We're going to play aggressive. It doesn't matter the result.
01:51Win or lose, the team remains a tight-knit community.
01:54For us, it's love and patience. We are more friends than like a cricket professional players.
02:01We got more family, friend each other. So we got a good bonding now.
02:06And the commitment to the sport may keep families in the country town longer.
02:10The environment what we have here, I don't think so. It's very hard to live at the moment.
02:16So yeah, I think they're going to live longer for here.
02:20Country cricket in full swing.