CRICKET - Kaipara Flats roll out red carpet

The Kaipara Flats Sports club will be rolling out the red carpet for Northland's premier grade cricketers this weekend as they descend on the club to complete their Twenty20 competition.
"We're doing the catering for the weekend - we want to show the club off - and we hope that quite a few people will be coming along to watch too," club spokesman John Stephen said.
The sports club, which operates cricket teams, a tennis club and netball teams, has just completed a $650,000 renovation of the clubrooms and is looking forward to hosting its first sports event since work was completed.
The ground floor was gutted and new changing rooms, an office, a storage area were built. New toilets, a lift for the disabled, a lounge extension, along with new stairs and a foyer area, were added to the building upstairs.
The current building dates back to 1972 but Stephen is hopeful the renovations will see the club's different codes settled in for the next 50 years.
There used to be a rugby club based at the ground but that has long gone, a victim of rural depopulation. That trend has halted and even been reversed in the area - if numbers at the club are anything to go by.
"What's happened is that a lot of the big farms have been split into smaller lifestyle blocks and once again there's a big residential community here," Stephen said.
And that means the sports club is growing. Club night on a Thursday is a catered affair that draws anything up to 100 people from the club's more than 300 members.
Good membership puts the club in a good financial state and that made raising the finance for the renovations much easier. The ASB Bank and the NZ Lottery Grants Board stumped up with major contributions.
The Kaipara Flats Cricket club has four senior teams - including a collegiate side _ a healthy roster that compares well with the other clubs in the region. The senior side plays in the Northland competition with the other senior teams playing in the Rodney competition.
Kamo and Onerahi are the unbeaten teams going into the third round but with three rounds still to play, with two rounds tomorrow and the final round on Sunday morning, the title is up for grabs. The final is scheduled for 2pm on Sunday.