Upgrade Barrow Cricket Club - Outfield Machinery

About our club

Barrow Cricket Club (Cheshire) is located 10 miles east of Chester in between the A51 and A56 and is set in the heart of rural Cheshire countryside. The ground is often described by many as a typical English Village cricket ground and often attracts passing visitors. We are a community sports club which has played an important role within the village of Great Barrow since its establishment in 1890. We have men's, women's and junior teams playing in the Cheshire leagues. (https://barrow.play-cricket.com/Aboutus)

The Club and the Local Community

The cricket club plays a central role in not just developing the sport of cricket, but acts as a community-hub, allowing for a sense of connection and increasing the ability of local people to make friends, keep fit and enjoy a sense of community. Regular club social nights held at the ground unite the club and the local Barrow Community. Fundraising from this years club social nights have helped fund a community defibrillator to be housed at the cricket club. This will now provide Barrow with a second defibrillator in the village.

Why are we fund raising ?

Like many other sports club throughout the country COVID-19 has had a negative impact on our cricket club. It has not only hit our finances hard, preventing us from fundraising through our usual social fundraising event activities, it severely disrupted our cricket events and our ability to grow the club membership as we had planned. With a reduced income we have struggled to fully fund our core cricketing activities and have been unable to fund many of our planned ground development projects. We are therefore looking to the community to help financially support us to improve our ground facilities for 2023.

Since the end of COVID-19 lockdown our club has nearly doubled its playing membership to over 200 by enhancing its junior section, introducing a women's team, adding a third and a mid week team alongside its thriving two men's senior teams.  As part of the clubs 5 year development plan there will be a continued drive to grow the membership of the club to over 300 recognising the important role cricket plays on the physical, mental and social wellbeing of individuals. The need to have useable playing facilities becomes even more essential especially with the increasingly unpredictable British summers to achieve our goal of servicing the needs of our wide ranging and diverse cricketing membership.

What we are Looking to Fund

We have 3 main aims for the fundraising :

1)  Improve the practice net surfaces. Our goal is to be able to attract better cricketers to the club as well as develop our home grown talent. We believe that by upgrading our current 2 lane net facilities we will be able to achieve this goal. Our current net facilities are outdated and becoming dangerous to use and are in desperate need of an upgrade. Due to the poor state of the artificial turf and drainage around the nets we are often unable to use the net facilities to train on.

2)  Replace the outfield ground machinery which includes an outfield mower, a mower for the square and a further mower for the wicket. This is a key consideration as our groundsmen at present cannot operate effectively use the old machinery. The groundsmen who are predominately volunteers cannot maintain the outfield and look after the square effectively. This can only be done when the machinery has had a full upgrade. 

3)  Add an All Weather Pitch to our Square. A significant increase in playing members has and will mean that the size of the square is no longer suitable for the growing numbers and training/playing needs of our cricketing members. We would like to install an all weather pitch to support the planned increased use.

This is a typical artificial cricket wicket.

Please Help Us!

Barrow Cricket Club needs your help to raise the required funds to deliver our 3 ground improvement areas to allow us to continue to grow the club in a friendly and safe way and update our ageing facilities.

We are working hard to raise as much funding as possible and your help would be really appreciated to give us that extra push to transform our ground into a more modern village ground.

Please donate as much as you can and help us to deliver these projects as soon as possible. Cricket season 2024 is just around the corner and we would like these projects completed and ready to benefit from for the start of next season. The crowdfunding campaign will hopefully provide us with the opportunity to reach our target of £6000 over the coming weeks.

Thank You!