Dinesha Devnarain calls herself a compassionate coach. She also refuses to let anyone confuse that with going easy. In a decade that has carried her from the end of her playing career to the centre of South Africa’s women’s cricket pathway, the head coach of the SA Under-19 Women and the Cricket South Africa Women’s National Academy has built her work on a single idea, that the person comes before the cricketer. As she puts it:
“Compassion does not mean soft. It means ‘I care enough to support the person and challenge the player’.”
South Africa Under-19 Women’s Cricket Team Head Coach, Dinesha Devnarain
She has a name for the philosophy. “Player, then Performance,” she calls it, or heart performance before sport performance. The thinking is simple to state and demanding to live by. A young athlete who feels seen, supported, challenged and clear has a stronger foundation to perform, but care can never come at the cost of the team’s standards. “Care and standards must work together,” she says, and a decade of evidence now sits behind the claim.
That clarity took years to earn. Devnarain, who made her international debut in 2008, captained the national side and retired in 2016, admits that her first instinct as a head coach was to get everything right. “You’re in no position to get anything wrong,” she remembers thinking, before learning to be kinder to herself and, harder still, to deliver honest feedback. Honest feedback, she has come to believe, has to be earned through relationship rather than imposed from above.
The dual national role arrived in April 2020, just as the country went into lockdown, an isolating start she now counts as formative. Confined with young players in hotel rooms and online rather than out on the field, she found there was far more to each of them than the cricketer. The period, she says, “actually taught me to listen a lot more.” It is where the whole-person approach hardened from instinct into method.
The qualifications followed the same instinct to keep growing. Devnarain was the first woman from KwaZulu-Natal to earn her CSA Level 3 coaching certificate, and in 2022 she became the first woman in South Africa to earn the Level 4. She sat in rooms of only men to get there, and she is clear about what the achievement obliges her to do next. Breaking a ceiling, she says, carries “my responsibility to not be the last in that.”
Inside camp, ‘Player then Performance’ looks less like a slogan and more like paperwork. Devnarain asks for her players’ school reports and assessment marks, and measures progress in places the scoreboard never records. A teenager who was failing maths two terms ago and is now passing it counts as performance. So does a player who conquered a fear of driving. “Your players are your resume,” she says, and the people she has developed are the proof she trusts most.
It also shapes who she picks. Skill is the easy part to see, she explains, because it can be coached and counted. What interests her more is everything around it, how a player takes feedback, how she responds to being dropped or hit for six, whether she can hold her emotions when a game turns. “You’re looking for bravery, courage,” Devnarain says. The behaviours, in her reading, tell her more than the cover drive. She watches, too, for whether a player will take feedback at all, since “how do they view feedback” often decides how far a teenager can travel.
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When she took the team to the inaugural ICC Under-19 Women’s T20 World Cup on home soil in 2023, the structure beneath her barely existed, and South Africa missed a playoff place on net run rate. What followed was an unsparing review. “We scrutinised the whole thing,” she says, across preparation, planning, communication, alignment and psychology. Seven of those players and much of the support staff carried into the 2025 edition in Malaysia, where South Africa reached the final as runners-up to India.
The pathway she describes is now producing senior Proteas. Nonkululeko Mlaba and Nondumiso Shangase came through the structures she helped shape, and the 2025 captain Kayla Reyneke and wicketkeeper Karabo Meso have since stepped up to the senior game. The aim, she says, is for a girl to reach professional cricket already fluent in the demands of an international environment. “Each two years, I feel like I’ve got the job again,” she says of the relentless turnover. “I’m starting again.”
The part of the story that animates her most is who stands on the touchline. At the 2025 World Cup the technical bench was fronted by four former Proteas in Devnarain, Trisha Chetty, Marcia Letsoalo and Angelique Taai. For young players, she says, the effect was immediate. “These are people that lived the badge. They won the badge.” The same women, she adds, showed the squad “there’s life after cricket as well,” in coaching, analysis, management and officiating.
Devnarain has carried that conviction beyond the national setup. She has mentored female coaches in Rwanda, and supported the ICC curriculum for aspiring Level 3 coaches through the 100% Female Leadership Programme alongside three other experienced coaches. Her argument is practical as much as principled. “For players to perform, you need proper environments, and proper environments are built by coaches,” she says. If the game keeps waiting for finished female coaches rather than giving them room to grow, she warns, the gaps will never close. Female coaches, in her words, “shouldn’t feel like they are guests.”
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Her sightlines are now on the next ICC Under-19 Women’s T20 World Cup in January 2027. Preparation has widened to take in strength and conditioning, physiotherapy, nutrition, academics and emotional control, with a workload group tracking every player and the people around her. The question driving all of it, she says, is “how do we make sure that the player is protected?” The vision she sets for the group is a match-winning cricketer who carries those habits, she says, “on a cricket field and in life.”
None of it, she insists, means lowering the bar. A player can fall short and still be held, supported and given a plan, but the standard stays. “We never dehumanise,” she says. “These girls need hope,” and the work is to hold them to account without ever throwing them away.
Asked what success looks like, Devnarain reaches past trophies to longevity. “We don’t want to be like a one hit wonder team,” she says, picturing a South Africa that produces cricketers and leaders for years, not seasons. She wants more women in every role around the game, coaches, analysts, managers, scorers and umpires, and she will not let go of the door she pushed open.
“I just want to see more women involved,” she says, before turning it into a challenge for them to “break their own ceilings.” For a coach who measures growth one percent at a time, the verdict on her decade is plain enough in her own telling. She frames the whole project as a daily search for improvement:
“Whether it’s by one percent or ten percent. We’re one of the nations that didn’t have much. We grew, we’re growing, and we’ll continue to grow.”
Main Photo Caption: Dinesha Devnarain, head coach of the SA Under-19 Women and the Cricket South Africa Women’s National Academy, whose decade of work has been built on putting the player before the performance. All Photos: Supplied
Photo 2 Caption: A former Proteas Women all-rounder, Devnarain guided the SA Under-19 Women to the 2025 ICC Under-19 Women’s T20 World Cup final.
Photo 3 Caption: Devnarain is the first woman in South Africa to earn the Cricket South Africa Level 4 coaching certificate.
Photo 4 Caption: The national U19 coach now turns preparation towards the next ICC Under-19 Women’s T20 World Cup in January 2027.
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