CACC - Cricket Development Fund

Aim

Cliftonville Academy Cricket Club hopes to raise some much-needed funds to continue the development of our club.

Who are we?

When Cliftonville and Academy Cricket Clubs merged in 2017, we set several ambitious goals, including taking our 1st XI from Section 2 at the time to the Premier League within 5-years. We also placed a significant emphasis on developing and expanding a relatively small youth section at the time. We are delighted with this progress in this area and have grown into the largest youth section in the North Belfast & Newtownabbey Area.

The next stage of the club's strategic development plan is to become both a competitive and sustainable premier league club; reliant on producing and developing its own youth players to become lifelong club members and push the very best to play for the club 1st XI at the highest level of club cricket in the NCU and Ireland.

We also recognise the rapid ascent in popularity of the women's game within the NCU/Ireland and want to establish a women's team for the forthcoming 2023 season.

Community impact

The Club has a large catchment area for its youth players spanning from North Belfast to the wider Newtownabbey area including settlements like Belfast, Carrickfergus, Whitehead, Templepatrick, Jordanstown and Greenisland. The clubs current facilities arrangement helps benefit this large catchment area with club matches taking place at the Castle Grounds in North Belfast but all Youth Training taking place at Ulster University Jordanstown. 

We are hoping the impact of this crowdfunding overall is a net benefit to the participation in cricket in these areas and also helps to further exacerbate the clubs recent growth.

There is a large demographic of females in the above areas and in our affiliated schools very keen to partake in cricket in a club & school setting, and we hope this crowdfunding will enable us to facilitate this. We have already began running some women's sessions through the winter which have been both a great success and vindication that the potential of this addition to club is huge.

Why are we crowdfunding?

Like all clubs, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the club in many ways. Like many clubs in many sports there were people in our membership who never returned after the pandemic, favouring more time spent in other areas of life that they re-discovered during the pandemic. As a club we also massively rely on memberships, sponsorship and fundraising events with members to generate funding for the club, both of which were greatly impacted for 2 years at a significant cost to the club.

We are specifically fundraising to establish a women / girls club which at present does not exist in the club or in any other clubs in the North Belfast Area. We plan to use the funds generated to offer this free of charge as we attempt to establish, grow and have women's and girls teams participating within existing NCU structures. We also hope to be able to raise excess funds to benefit our existing youth coaching programmes.

We need your help to raise 10,000. If the club hits a target of 5,000 on Crowdfunder, Sport NI will match this figure with a further 5,000.

How we?ll spend the money raised

More specifically, these funds raised will be used in the following areas:

• Improvement of Facilities at Castle Grounds.
• Establish and Grow a Girls & Women's Section within the Club.
• Specialist Paid Coaching for the Girls & Women's Club
• Training Equipment
• To Fund Coaching Sessions within Primary & Secondary Schools in the Local Area to continue growing the Club & the Game of Cricket.

This project successfully funded on 17th April 2023