At Berkshire Cricket Foundation, we are very glad to have NACC Chairman Gulfraz Riaz as one of our trustees. His article in the previous edition of the NACC newsletter touched on an idea that he and I have discussed several times in recent months, namely making use of school net facilities available to South Asian Parks teams in the evenings.
Thankfully, we have been successful in setting up such an initiative in Reading. The school in question is Crosfields School, an independent prep school that is within the town itself, and therefore easily accessible. They have an excellent 6-bay net facility, that is hardly used outside of school hours. Thankfully, we have an existing relationship with this school, as we have previously hired their indoor facilities for our Reading MCC Foundation Hub programme. As a result, we were able to secure usage of their outdoor nets every Monday evening, for the duration of the cricket season, for community drop-in nets sessions, which we publicised to all the Reading-based teams playing in the South East Sunday Cricket League. Currently, there are 12 teams from Reading, all playing a full fixture list of SESCL league games on Sundays. This is a number that has been steadily growing over the last 5 years, or so. As none of these clubs have a facility of their own, they all have to rent, and due to the availability of grounds locally, only 2 teams out of those 12 are able to play their home matches within the borough of Reading itself. Clearly none of them would have had any access whatsoever to outdoor practice facilities either.
I am glad to say that the community nets have proved successful. Despite the regular rain throughout May, these sessions have been going ahead regularly, with many of the 12 teams represented. The hope is that we will be able to offer this opportunity for many years in the future, so that a generation of South Asian players can grow up with opportunities to develop and work on their skills that were not available to those who came before them.
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