L.H. Sunil the legendary Junior Cricket coach from Matara
Winning 27 All-Island junior cricket championships and nine runners-up titles within a span of 30 years is an achievement that would be a dream for most cricket coaches but there is one person in the island who has guided his young charges to achieve this feat and will be hard to beat.
Fifteen Under-15 Division I titles, three Division II titles, six Under-13 Division I titles, two Division II tittles and a Division III title make up the 27 All-Island schools cricket championships what Lokuthota Hewage Sunil has achieved in a coaching career which started in 1984.
L.H. Sunil is an old boy of St. Servatius College, Matara. He represented the College at Cricket and Football from 1971to 1976 and led the football team in 1974 and the first XI cricket team in 1975. As a grade nine student Sunil was a member of the St. Servatius team of 1971 that registered its last recorded win in the battle of Nilwala.
He represented the Matara Sports Club team during his school days and the Stonewallers SC once he joined the service of the Sri Lanka Prisons. It was in 1984 that late W.A.N. Silva helped Sunil start his career as a cricket coach by recommending him to the Principal of D.S. Senanayake College.
His dedication was rewarded the very next year with D.S. Senanayake College’s Under-15 A winning the Division I title, a feat which was repeated in 1987, 1990 and 1991 while being runners up in 1986. Not to be out done the Under-13 Division I team emerged runners-up in 1990 and clinched the Division I title in 1992 and 1993 while the Under-13 Division II team were runners-up in 1993.Pubudu Dassanayake, Pulasthi Gunaratne and Naveed Nawaz are players who learned their ABC of the game from Sunil while he served D.S. Senanayake College. The success of the junior cricketers of D.S. Senanayake College under Sunil’s guidance saw him being offered the post of junior coach of St. Peter’s College in late 1993. He was the driving force behind the Peterite Under-15 team that won the Division I title the very next season. The Petes have been winning Under-13 and Under-15 titles in all age groups regularly since then. In 2008 St. Peter’s played in the finals of all three divisions in the Under-15 age group winning the Division I and Division II crowns.
Malinda Warnapura, Kaushal Lokuarachchi and Anjelo Perera are a few of the hundreds of youngsters who were nurtured by Sunil at St. Peter’s. “I have been encouraged and well supported by Reverend Fathers, Travis Gabriel and Filician Ranjith Perera throughout my career as the Head Junior Coach of St. Peter’s College for which I am eternally grateful. I owe all to the hundreds of youngsters who were ever willing to learn and whose performance has been much more than what I expected of them. I am ever willing to listen and learn from my players as well as players of opponent teams which has been a key to my success as a coach,” said Sunil.
The carefully preserved paper cuttings and photographs cherished by him speak of his success story from his school days to date.