South Holderness CC's 2017 All Stars Cricket experience.
South Holderness Cricket Club is a well-established club situated in Hedon, five miles east of Hull, East Yorkshire. It operates two senior teams in the York and District Senior Cricket League.
The junior section, however, has been largely non-existent for the past few years due to the lack of available volunteer coaches after previous coaches moved away from the club, combined with the lack of available people in the club’s rural location. Rob Johnson, the club’s junior coach and new All Stars Activator, said that, considering these issues:
“All Stars was an area of particular interest to the club and, as a committee, we had discussed it at length in terms of the future of the club and where the next development was going to come from. We recognised that a key aim for the future was to get more children involved. With the new East Yorkshire U9s League being developed, we set a target to be participating in this league for the 2019 season.”
Once the decision to take part in All Stars was taken, Rob was very proactive when it came to promoting the programme at South Holderness. The club did a lot of self-promotion via various social media channels as well as delivering over 1000 leaflets to children in schools and the surrounding areas!
South Holderness had a fantastic 24 kids sign up for All Stars and the programme seemed the ideal fit for the club and the local community! The sessions ran on Wednesday nights from 5.30pm to 6.30pm. All Star parents were encouraged to get involved with their child’s development during all the sessions. Getting parents to participate gave the session a much more inclusive and engaging feel, whilst also helping the club develop more volunteers, who were happy to get involved in different club activities.
One of the key elements of All Stars Cricket is training up parents and club coaches to become All Stars Activators:
“The club only has me as a Level 2 qualified coach,” said Rob, “so All Stars helps us get more volunteers for that as well!”
All Stars opened up a huge wealth of possibilities for South Holderness. As identified by Rob:
“The experience of the All Stars programme has allowed the club to develop a session for children of all ages, which runs after the All Stars sessions. Over 20 kids regularly came down to it and it even led to the club planning a summer camp due to the success of both programmes!”
After one of the sessions, one of the parents even contacted the club on Twitter to let them know that they, together with their son, had gone “to the park after the session. He played more cricket there and was in the garden again at 8am this morning practicing his batting!”
Rob and all at South Holderness Cricket Club put in a fantastic amount of effort to make a huge success of All Stars Cricket in 2017. All Stars brought the community down to the club in the form of kids, parents, volunteers and, hopefully, future cricketers! The club is now ready to take the next step in their junior progress. They have made plans towards developing an older age group team as well as the summer camp for all ages – including children from the All Stars Cricket sessions in 2017!