KARACHI, May 27 Former national women's cricket team coach Umer Rashid has started a new project in collaboration with PCB women's representative for Hyderabad region, Dr Yasmeen Iqbal, for promoting cricket among school girls.

“The idea just came to me last week that we should introduce cricket to school girls in a bid to pay attention to the sport at the grass root level,” said Umer Rashid while speaking to Dawn from Hyderabad on Thursday.

“So we decided to impart some coaching to sports teachers here so that they could go back to their schools and encourage the children to play cricket during their sports period,” he continued.

“Although the Pakistan Cricket Board [PCB] has assigned me the job of coaching men here in Hyderabad, I still felt it my duty to do whatever little I can do for women's cricket after leaving the national women's team,” he said.

Meanwhile, Dr Yasmeen Iqbal, PCB's regional representative for Hyderabad, said “We just decided to provide basic cricket training to school teachers here. The coaching workshop carried out by Umer Rashid, Iqbal Imam, another PCB regional coach here, and Javed Shaikh, a PCB trainer for the region, was attended by some 30 sports teachers from 15 schools of Hyderabad and Jamshoro. There were two teachers from each school.”

Dr Yasmeen, who is also director of the Centre for Health and Physical Education at the University of Jamshoro, said that she intended monitoring the teachers' work in the schools.

“Besides checking on them, we will also spread this to all the 22 districts of Hyderabad,” she said.

Asked what the PCB Women's Wing thought of the project, she said “This is an initiative that we took on our own. The Women's Wing has no knowledge of it.”