With the successes of our football team extending their season somewhat, we are a bit late to get cricket up and running for this year – we’d normally have started from immediately after Easter.
We are now able to start a shortened cricket season. We are entered in a few Kwik-Cricket tournaments and we have some inter-house events planned for the children. There will also be a special family/community cricket event for all to enjoy.
Given the late start, we do not really expect to be able to put out a competitive ‘hard-ball’ team to play other schools this year. We’ve not really done the ‘groundwork’ necessary to make that feasible, enjoyable or, more importantly, safe! We do have a couple of county-standard players and good club players, but not enough others to properly create a team around them. We’ll aim to build back up to that for next Summer.
We also don’t feel we’ve done enough preparation to have a feasible group training in the nets with the hard ball and the bowling machine.
So, cricket club will focus very much on development, largely through quick cricket with a soft ball. As such, we think it will be more appropriate and beneficial to Year 5s than Year 6s, though the latter are welcome to apply to join; as long as they know the level we’ll be at!
We would love to see some girls playing. From PE lessons with Year 5, we are aware of some real potential, which we would be keen to develop further.
Our maximum capacity is 20; 10 boys and 10 girls. Any bigger numbers and we lose impact – we get too many children waiting around for their turn to bat or bowl and they don’t get the coaching they need for such a technical sport. We will operate on a first-come, first-served basis and run a waiting list if necessary.
The club will run on Mondays, 3:30 to 4:30, by Mr Hillier and Mr Pattison together. We will start on the first Monday back after the holiday. As time is tight, we will not be sending out a paper reply slip. To apply for a place, please email Mr Hillier as soon as possible. He will email back to confirm (or otherwise if we’ve been over-subscribed) a place. If you could put ‘Cricket Club’ in the header, that would help Mr H spot it amongst all the other zillions of emails!