CRICKET - Southee fires up Northland

WATCHING BLACK CAPS bowler Tim Southee succeed on the recent tour of England has helped motivate Kyron Dill in his pre-season cricket training this week.
The success of Southee was encouraging for other young Northland players with Dill and four other Northlanders selected last week in the Northern Districts Cricket Academy
Dill said: "It's awesome to see him get picked and even better to see him doing so well with the Black Caps. I don't think many people thought he was going to get awarded the player of the series award [for the one-day series]."
Dill is the most far-flung of the Northland juniors named in the academy, which means he needs to be a little bit more focused than the rest of his teammates.
The 17-year-old Dill goes to Mahurangi College in Warkworth, making a trip to Whangarei to train with Northland junior development coach Karl Treiber a tougher ask than for his fellow academy players, who are all Whangarei-based.
Treiber said the "cluster" of good junior players augured well for the future of Northland cricket, a phenomenon he last noted here when Whangarei Boys' High School had a core of players such as Matt Bell and Stephen Cunis that helped them win the Gillette Cup.
"It's a happy accident sometimes when it happens but, sometimes, we prefer to think it's a result of hard work ... that a group of players come through of a high quality in the same sort of age group and that lifts the standard of everybody around them," he said.
Treiber said other players like Josh Matthews were unlucky to have missed out on academy selection but would continue to train with the academy players.
The promising junior players would soon begin to bolster the province's senior ranks, perhaps even as early as this year but certainly in the next couple of years.
Dill, who was thrilled about being included in the academy, said: "It's going to be awesome, I've had a meeting with [ND high performance coach] Craig Ross and he's sorted me out a new specialist trainer, who's going to be working on my conditioning.
"He's given me a weekly routine that I have to stick to, which involves basic fitness and some training but it's not really cricket specific, it's mostly fitness at this stage."
The right-arm medium fast bowler has impressed in ND age-group tournaments and was selected in the ND under-17 squad on the back of good form but he is also a promising batsman, batting at number three for the Northland under-17 team.
Dill said: "I'm now in the under-19 grade for the first time this season and it would be awesome to make the Northern Districts under-19 team but that will be pretty hard to do in my first year in the grade."
Curtis Cherrington, Henry Cooper, Rory Darkins and Ben Hyde are the other Northlanders in the academy.
"Northland cricket is in good shape, we've got a pretty strong team and there are heaps of promising players coming up so we're looking pretty good," Dill said.