"After school is a bit of a worry - what happens to guys then? Club cricket seems to have gone downhill and the academy system isn't really working in all provinces.
"There seems to be a void and that worries me, because batsmen take longer to mature and you can lose a whole percentage of batsmen in that 18- to 21-year-old period.
"Some guys mature later and they could be your top players. That's an area in which I'd like to see if we can improve things."
Dale Benkenstein spoke the day before Cricket SA (CSA) proclaimed the "huge impact on the broadening of the talent pool at youth level" their system of community hubs and regional performances centres (RPC) was, they said, having on the game.
"There has been an explosion of talent coming through this year and the number of players selected for the youth tournaments has rocketed to 243 [up from 136 last year]," a release quoted CSA's cricket general manager, Corrie van Zyl, as saying."This is a huge increase by any standards and will strengthen our resolve to give more children from our nontraditional feeder systems the chance to excel."
The suits tend to cop it in these pages, but there is no question they have put much effort and devoted their best expertise into ensuring that junior cricket is healthy.
It's what happens next that's the challenge.
"Clubs are struggling and the more they do the more the structure is starting to collapse," said Brad Bing, who has been part of cricket in many capacities and levels and is the managing director of Sporting Chance, a Western Cape coaching network.
"And they've taken away B-section cricket. So the incentive to continue if you weren't in an academy was zero.
"Anyway, there are players who come from academies who don't make the grade because they haven't played club cricket, where their issues would have been sorted out.
"When they took away the hopes of players in a structured club set-up to play B-section cricket, they killed a lot of dreams. With that came killing the depth of talent...