ACT Comets' future sunny beyond the cricket-cancelling rain

The Comets will return to a stand-alone team next summer with the talent purely taken from the Cricket ACT competitions.

It was a ray of sunshine on an otherwise bleak day in the capital, which led to the opening round of the cricket season being washed out - more than 24 hours before the first ball was scheduled to be bowled.

Canberra cricketers' opportunities for the Comets in the national second XI competition have been limited for the past few years with a majority of players coming from country NSW areas like Newcastle.

It became almost a NSW third XI, with NSW Blues players like Trent Copeland and Matthew Gilkes set to play for the Comets in their season opener against Tasmania in Albury on Monday.

But that will change next summer with the Comets returning to what they once were - a team of ACT cricketers.

It's a change that will start in the junior levels, for both men and women, this summer before extending to the Comets in 2023-24.

Tuggeranong Valley's Shane Devoy recalled what it was as a 17-year-old having the Comets as a genuine pathway.

"I think it's a really exciting time in Canberra," he said.

"I'm very much on the downhill slope at the moment, but thinking back to being a 17-18-year-old and looking at the opportunities that you had to be a cricketer in Canberra.

"You need to look no further than Nathan Lyon or Jason Behrendorff to see what that could do.

"To be able to have Canberra sitting alone again in the youth pathway and hopefully a long way beyond that - really exciting times."

Cricket ACT head of cricket Stuart Karppinen said it was an important step to building a pathway for male cricket - something that already exists for the women with the ACT Meteors' playing in the WNCL.

As revealed by The Canberra Times, the eventual goal was for the ACT to have its own Sheffield Shield team.

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"It's huge ... it gives them something to aspire to," Karppinen said.

"It presents opportunities, admittedly at the second tier, but at least there's opportunities to be seen by other states and it becomes a pathway there that those that are aspiring to play at high levels there's actually a level to be able to do it here in Canberra.

"Given our population growth that we've had, given that the Shield competitions and March Cup have for the most part stayed the same is that appropriate that our population has doubled and we haven't seen a change in the number of [Sheffield Shield] teams."

Karppinen said Canberra's constant rain over the past two summers, off the back of the bushfires and drought the season before that, was a concern when it came to the development of ACT cricketers.

It was why he was looking at ways to bolster opportunities and look at ideas like getting more Canberra cricketers the chance to play in the Darwin competition over the ACT winter - something Comet Blake Macdonald did this year.

"I do have some concerns that there's an impact on the rate of development of players not getting the same amount of playing opportunities over the past couple of years," Karppinen said.

"There's broader discussions ... on how can we make up some time or accelerate the rate of development within our players. It's a bit of a think tank."

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