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Back where it all started. And the importance of a hub for local cricket.

This week, I visited† the Ilford Cricket School, for the first time since I left school in 1980.

Where I, and countless numbers of local school children, have been introduced to the game since the facility opened more than 70 years ago.

The telephone number on the board by the front door has not updated since the “Big Number Change” in 2000, and some of the decor inside is possibly of the same vintage…

Ilford Cricket School, January 2024

But it’s an indoor facility where otherwise there was none back then.

Where State schools and local clubs got to practice.

It demonstrates perfectly, for me, the importance of a local hub, no matter how humble, in promoting and supporting the game.

Would the London Borough of Redbridge be host to 7 Essex “Premier” clubs, each running three or more Saturday XIs and numerous junior sides, if the Cricket School had never found a home in Ilford?

I rather doubt it.
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10 January, 2024
What makes a good “development” club?
I posted earlier today on a proposal for an alternative development pathway for U13 cricket in England.

In that post, I included a set of criteria for identifying a “good” club — good, in this context, meaning one that could be entrusted with leading a local development cluster at U13.

The list originated in a discussion of a fictitious “Top 100 Clubs” feature article for one of the cricket magazines, to sit alongside their “Top 100 Schools” pieces.

I left the list as a work-in-progress, but it is, perhaps, an interesting project it its own right.

My initial list:
- Retention — do players stay with the Club over time, or drift in and out again?
- Accessibility & inclusion (both by ability & age — good clubs welcome late starters).
- Diversity of players & coaches (contentious; needs to be context-sensitive; difficult to quantify).
- Parental engagement (see above).
- “Lived” coaching philosophy — do coaches “walk the walk”?
- Outreach & recruitment (active or passive?).
- Further down the list: games won — I do believe that winning matters!
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23 November, 2023
What are we going to do next? Thoughts on the new development pyramid at U13, post-ICEC.

County Age Group coaches and pathway leaders should be tasked, as part of the State Schools Action Plan…, with delivering a positive State school cricket offering at the U10-U13 level.
Holding Up a Mirror to Cricket — A Report by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket, June 2023: Recommendation 41

The intention behind this, as with all of the recommendations in the ICEC Report, being to reduce inequity in the game — in this instance, specifically targeting the under-representation of State school educated players in the professional game.

This recommendation (shifting U13 CAG coaches from selective pathways into schools) sits alongside a wider feeling that U13 is too simply early to select (and de-select) players.

Holding Up a Mirror to Cricket — A Report by the Independent Commission on Equity in Cricket, June 2023: Recommendation 40

In the course of a lengthy conversation on this subject with fellow coaches on the future (on X-tter — it’s not entirely toxic on there), we were challenged to envisage what the new pyramid at U13 might look like.

My attempt to answer this (modified a little since the original discussion), follows.
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23 November, 2023