Cricket season has arrived early for six up and comers on the New Zealand cricket scene.

Kyle Mills, a recovering TelstraClear Black Cap, Jamie How, Jeetan Patel, Shanan Stewart, Rob Nicol and Joseph Yovich, have been called into the New Zealand Academy side to travel to Townsville for a Southern Hemisphere cricket academies tournament.

The team leaves on Wednesday next week and will play two three-day games against each of the Australian and South African Academies and two one-day games with each.

Bangladesh was to have been involved as well but it withdrew from the tournament.

The extra players have been required because only eight males (Jesse Ryder, Jordan Sheed, Stuart Mills, Iain Robertson, Mark Gillespie, Gareth Shaw, James McMillan and Ian Sandbrook) were included in the Academy intake this year, and also to ensure the bowling workloads are not too heavy on the Academy players.

That suits Mills and Yovich especially. Mills is coming back after injury and has already gone to Darwin to get some preliminary match play under his belt.

Yovich has been working at the High Performance Centre at Lincoln University with New Zealand Cricket's player development manager Ashley Ross in the off-season on some technical aspects of his bowling which needed to be tested out in a playing environment.

The series of games are a chance for Academy coaches to assess and analyse the players and to work with them when they return to Lincoln.

© CricInfo