New Nets for Junior Cricket - Catford Wanderers CC

We are the Catford Wanderers Sports Club Cricket section. We're an amateur cricket club situated in the suburbs of inner city London in Catford. We have two men's teams that play in competitive divisions of the Kent cricket league, T20 teams, a Sunday XI and a small junior section. We previously had a lot more teams, a women's team and several junior teams. However, due to a lack of investment and the Covid pandemic, our numbers decreased considerably and in the last 3 years we have been working hard to build them back up. The club will not survivie otherwise.  

Community impact

The club has been around since 1906, providing a sporting home for the local community, which has a diverse mix of backgrounds. We are based in an underpriviledged area of south-east London, Catford in the borough of Lewisham. This borough has one of the highest proportion of children living below the poverty line across the country, almost 40% according to the End Child Poverty Coalition. Our sports club is key to providing the infrastructure for local kids to get into sports, develop their skills and feel part of a team.

Legacy of the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games

In order to support young people from local communities continued growth in sport we are raising funding in line with the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games rebuilding sport in communities programme. Funds raised will go towards rebuilding outdoor cricket nets at the ground so that we can provide good quality cricket coaching and the opportunity for children from all around the area to get involved with the sport. 

The club did have nets a long time ago but were not useable for the last 7 years due to degradation and health and safety concerns. They were fully dismantled in 2020 and sold for scrap metal before nature took it’s course on the ground surface.

These were our nets pre-Covid. They were not in a good shape at all.

We have updated the Crowdfunder Initial Target to £20,000. The total fundraising breakdown for the project is per below:

Total Project Cost: £45,000

Crowdfunding Initial Target: £20,000

Club private fundraising: £25,000

With the funds raised for new facilities we will be able:

• To vastly improve our ground and facility to provide a safe training space
• To increase capacity for our junior practice sessions 
• To develop junior cricketers onto hardball cricket providing new opportunities to those in the community
• Allow us to hold open sessions to attract new junior players 
• Improve the quality of our practice sessions and ultimately the standard of cricketer we can produce 
• Increase our membership and club sustainability 
• Give our coaches the tools to get the best out of our practice sessions

Four simple ways to help us reach our target, and make this project a reality.

1. Make a pledge. Please don't delay if you’re going to support us because momentum is key to our success!

2. Spread the word. Share our project on your social media pages and tell the world to get behind us! The more people we reach, the more support we will get.

3. Offer rewards. Get involved if you are a local business by donating things we can offer to our supporters. We will give you a shout out!

4. If you want to run your own fundraiser to support us, maybe a sponsored activity or similar, use the 'contact project' button at the top of our page to let us know. Setting up your own page only takes a few minutes and you won’t need any bank details. Just a fun idea!

More About Our Club

Match Day

It's glorious to see cricket being played throughout the summer. The club provides a community for so many people from the area to come by and watch the games.

Our 2nd XI won their league last year!

Even without a complete set of training facilities these guys managed to successfully win their league last year and move up to the Kent 2nd Division.

This was our Women's 1st XI team

We really miss the diversity of a women's cricket section to work alongside the men's. We would love to see some of the young girls in the juniors now grow and develop to form a women's team again in the future. 

Without these teams, the long term sustainability of the cricket club in the area is at risk. We are passionately working to turn this around and provide cricket coaching for local children to occupy their time, burn their energy and stimulate them mentally and physically.

Our Junior Future Cricket Stars 

We currently have 50 enrolled in the ECB backed All Stars and Dynamos cricket courses, which has been a success over the last 3 years. This program aims to get youngsters into cricket at the grass roots level, however we need to develop the infrastructure to move the children beyond this into junior hardball cricket. It's the most common question we hear from parents around what can we offer next in the development of cricket for their children. There are near 20 children ready to move up to the next level but without the correct training facilities it is very hard for us to offer this properly. 

With new nets to train in, we will develop junior teams throughout the young person age groups from 7 years old up to adult cricket, teaching them new skills, leadership and potentially discovering hidden natural talent to become the country's future sports stars. 

CWCC's Pro-Cricketer Success Story

There is a local boy that started his cricket life out at Catford Wanderers aged 7. We are very proud that he went on to represent Kent county and England at various levels, signing a professional contract with Kent in 2010. His name is Daniel Bell Drummond. Daniel or’DBD’ as many know him, is a regular visitor back to the club which was his original home for cricket and where he has many friends.

More about the project

We will partner with a top installer of synthetic surface ECB approved cricket facilities with more than 30 years experience. 

Here are the net location plans - we are going with the existing location in the bottom left corner of the image.

Here's a design of the nets facilities:

The Finished Product

Cricket nets when installed properly and looked after by the club will last for decades. It will be amazing to get to this finished product and to see a growing number of kids training in the nets.

How you can play your part

We really hope with the generosity of the public, Sport England and the United by Birmingham 2022 Community programme, we can make this project happen and move forward to provide an excellent standard cricket facility again for this underpriviledged area of London. 

We really appreciate any amount you can provide to help us on this journey. 

Thank you for looking, from all of us at Catford Wanderers Cricket Club.