Kids Cricket: How to Make the Summer Longer
Cricket coach Darren Talbot has been thinking about how to make the most of a short English summer for kids still in school
The summer is far too short for colts cricket here in the UK and it’s causing a problem.
Matches start at the start of May and end when schools break up in mid-July. Kids are getting barely 3 months of competition. Certainly in my area this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
6 whole weeks of potential cricket, including the whole of August and how much is played?
The stronger clubs, down south at least, are generally packed full of private school kids. Not a surprise I’m sure but those 2-3 weeks before the state schools break up is prime time for private school parents to go away on holiday.
The shrewd teams schedule all of their matches to be finished by end June just in case and hope that parents are back in time for finals.
Formal club matches, with a few exceptions, simply don’t work in the school holidays.
Other than player availability - and we’ve tried 6 or 8 a side tournaments and they don’t work either - the main reason is that the volunteer managers have usually had enough by then.
Clubs understandably feel that running their junior training sessions after schools break up is not worth the hassle.
When I coached at a club we actually did continue all the way through because I couldn’t bear the thought of there not being cricket during this period but we had to be creative.
Generally we planned little other than see what we get and then organise the groups accordingly.
We tried planning more than that but numbers fluctuated so wildly that it wasn’t worth it in the end.
With sometimes as few as 20 colts it was often as simple as diamond cricket (pdf) games and the like.
There is far too much snobbery against this sort of cricket. It’s all about the kids enjoying themselves. If they do, they come back.
But this won’t suit everyone, either from a club or parent or child perspective.
That’s pretty why we started our summer cricket camps business.
Based around the Twenty20 Cricket format, all attendees at our camps from the age of 6 to 15 play a full Twenty20 Cricket match each day.
For the top groups that means a pink hardball, fielding circles, powerplays, free hits – the lot!
For the younger groups there will be age appropriate watered down versions but just as much fun.
During the other half of the day we teach them some T20 skills.
Again for the older groups this may be slog sweeps, six hitting or even Dilscoops! For the younger groups it might be working on running between the wickets or bowling straight
If you are wondering what to do in those dead weeks, we’ve got camps running in Surrey, Middlesex, Lancashire and Greater Manchester this UK summer.
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hiiiiii david i want to ask that how we can play flight (spin) bowl aginst spninners very welllllllllllll.........................
David/Darren
Some interesting thoughts, this particularly caught my eye having just taken over as our local junior league fixture co-ordinator:
"Other than player availability - and we’ve tried 6 or 8 a side tournaments and they don’t work either - the main reason is that the volunteer managers have usually had enough by then."
We are going to trial an 8-a-side summer holiday tournament in an attempt to address the problem you have identified, although I think we will have less teams than compete in the league, hopefully it will be enough to prove worthwhile for all concerned. A number of local clubs do run summer training weeks, but this too is a big commitment on volunteer co-ordinators and it often seems to players and parents that we have the season back to front, a great bit of 'intensive' training that follows the league season.
Perhaps another option for those of us in less 'metropolitan' areas might be the tour option - not necessarily a full blow overnight/weekend stay, but just going that little bit further to capture the imagination of players and parents and get a game in against some different opposition
One interesting thing that is starting to happen in India is privately run leagues organised by a visionary single person. It's creating some interesting models, including the idea of "franchises".
Great article, dead right. In Greenwich, we run holiday courses right through the summer holidays, every day, every week, getting as many as 70 kids each week, with training and match play. Recently we have expanded into the 4 to 7 year group (mornings), and with specialised coaching in the afternoons for the 13+ age group. We're even talking about involving mums and dads in fitness and tennis sessions!
Word of mouth over many years is our greatest advert, but we also run our courses next to a railway station, so commuting parents from all over Kent can drop their kids off on the way to London, park in our car park and catch a train into London, collecting kids and car on the way back!