Whilst it may be still a bit dark and damp outside, you can sense the buzz that the cricket season is nearly upon us as the players start Winter nets this week. Cricket Chairman Andy Roberts has organised for these to be at Birkenhead School this year, with both Juniors and Seniors training on the same night. Whilst this naturally works out from a logistical perspective with the Seniors following on from the Juniors, it also demonstrates the ‘One Club’ philosophy and further strengthen those links between the two areas - I might even pop along myself in a bid to try and force my way into Warbo’s Over 40’s squad!!

Keeping in the Winter theme, but changing sports slightly, a couple of weeks ago I finally ran out of excuses and got involved with some vets rugby at New Brighton. It’s based around an initiative to get those who aren’t playing anymore back involved which is great to see the RFU trying to be creative, something I’ll touch on a bit later in relation to the ECB. What it did give me the opportunity to do was step out on the same pitch as our new recruit; Neil Cross. It must be about 20 years since we last ran out together and I’d like to think our rugby knowledge has expanded in that time at the same rate as our waistlines! One thing we both agreed was that we’re at the cricket season can’t come soon enough as running round on a freezing cold January night is not as fun as it used to be!

Back to Club “stuff” and it was quite a pleasant start to January as Club ‘business’ seemed to be relatively quiet, well certainly for the first half of the month, but the last couple of weeks have been crazy! The Governing Committee met on the 9th January and the agenda was rattled through in record time (keeping Nigel Sharrock happy who was on a deadline to get home to watch Silent Witness!). As ever, there was fruitful debate and a few key things coming out of the meeting. John Scragg put forward his proposal for the new “100 Club”, and whilst I won’t go into detail here as we will be launching this shortly, what I can say is that the revamped format will be bigger and better with more chances of winning. One other area we touched on is something Junior Cricket Chairman Simon McGowan and Treasurer Richie Simcox have been working on around a ‘Family Membership’. What we have found is that whilst we have in excess of 100 registered juniors, very few of the parents are members of the Club. On one hand this poses us challenges with regards to our licensing, but the flip side is that it will hopefully encourage parents to feel a greater affinity with the Club and also helps demonstrate that we have a growing membership. The latter point being vitally important when we are looking at securing additional funding from various governing bodies and grants.
You’ll hopefully be aware that for the past year we have been working with Vital Signs Foundation raising funds for them. A week and a half ago it was an absolute pleasure to witness the brilliant work that goes on as a result of that fundraising as 72 people were screened and as far as I’m aware only one of those was referred for further assessment. As well as the benefits that those who were screened enjoyed, it was also a fantastic day for raising the profile of VSF, Upton Cricket Club and also Overchurch Junior School who were great at letting us host the day in their school. Reflecting back at the end of the day with a beer (yes I appreciate not the healthiest thing – but it was a Saturday after all!!) it was one of those day’s that makes you feel proud and I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do as a club to further contribute to this amazing cause. Continuing on that theme, I was thrilled when Steve McCormick contacted me indicating he was interested in taking on the role of Charity Coordinator. Having met with Steve initially last week, we had a further meeting last night with Lynn Hedgecoe (VSF Trustee) and there are some great ideas being kicked around which we will be able to unveil in the coming weeks. Whilst I appreciate that people don’t have bottomless pockets when it comes to charity donations, the generosity of UCC members has astounded me and made me extremely proud.

Within the four walls of the clubhouse the lounge refurbishment has been making good progress over the last few weeks. The new ceiling and lighting has been fitted, and WOW – what a difference it makes! The next steps are to get all the photos, memorabilia and TV up, and in the coming weeks the seating area will be reupholstered. I hope when you next walk through the doors you’ll be impressed and my thanks go to Ken Barrett and Rob Chapman for pulling this all together to create a better environment for you to enjoy being a member of our Club.

Hopefully, you will have seen the article earlier this week about some exciting ‘kit’ sponsorship opportunities. I’ve quoted this figure before, but it costs us £42,000 just to open our doors to play cricket, so every bit of help we can receive makes a huge difference. However, it’s not just about us invoicing sponsors and then that’s it – it’s about creating the right partnerships with them so that they feel real value from being associated with Upton Cricket Club and having their brand on our kit. If anybody knows of any organisations that this may be of interest to then please get in touch via email or on 07887 743 230.

To close, I hinted earlier about things coming out of the ECB. Reading an interview with Matt Dwyer (Director of Participation Growth at the ECB) he touched on a few key areas that we can relate to. There was a heavy emphasis on the new “All Stars” programme which is aimed at encouraging 5 to 8 year olds by providing free kit and imaginative training sessions. Whilst the target here for the ECB is to increase participation, I think our challenge is slightly different as we have an abundance of children in that age bracket, our biggest challenge is recruiting enough volunteers. Simon McGowan touched on it a few days back in his article with the reality being that if we don’t get more volunteers/coaches then we may have to limit our numbers – a situation I’m sure none of us want. Matt Dwyer also referenced the inadequacies of the ECB’s Play-Cricket.com website facility. We’ve obviously moved away from this as the platform for hosting our website content but it remains the default results input tool. Only a couple of days ago I saw progression in this area with the announcement of a new online ‘live’ scoring app. Last year you may know that we used ‘Total Cricket Scorer’ for this very purpose, so we’ll keep a watching brief on the qualities of this app to see if it rivals TCS or not. Another area he touched on was about keeping youngster in the game as there is a natural drop-off with competing priorities in the latter teen years. The focus seemed to be on ensuring that the right facilities are available in clubhouses (e.g. Wi-Fi etc.) to keep them interested and the ECB are looking at working with various companies to see what can be done in this area.

So to close, hopefully you’ll see that there’s loads going on and the good news is it’s only 80 sleeps until the first ball of the season is bowled!