Rolling out the green carpet at H&TCC

Hadleigh & Thundersley Cricket Club - Background

We are a family friendly amateur cricket club in Essex founded in 1946 that is open to everyone in our community regardless of age, gender, ability and socioeconomic background. Our club has a reputation for developing young cricketers, we currently have a youth membership of over 150 young cricketers playing at our club. Youth can start from the age of 5 as part of our ECB All Stars Programme and we mentor and develop all the way to senior cricket. This has ultimately led to the successes in our mid-week senior team and four Saturday teams with our 1st XI currently competing within the best standard league in Essex.

We are also proud to have developed a women's cricket team over the past 2 years, whom compete in a regional league. We are excited to grow women's cricket membership further and are building a sustainable future through our girls only ECB Dynamos Programme for 8 too 11-year-old girls. 

We are also a thriving community hub for the local area, hiring our facilities out to local community groups and schools.

What are we crowdfunding for and why?

We are raising funds to install new net facilities, our current facilities are not fit for purpose to sustain the growth of our cricket club. The new facilities will include a three-lane enclosed net facility to ECB standards with a full-length bowler's run-up and realistic bounce. In addition a single lane facility will remain open to the community for use all year round. The total cost for this project is £125,000 so we need your support to be able to proceed with the project for the benefit of our community.

Through your generous support, building on the success of previous fundraising events and activities, we are aiming to deliver the following benefits from our project:

1. Increased training capacity to ensure all our youth, women and senior cricket members can have the coaching and practice time they deserve while we continue to grow as a club.

2. Improved surface quality to allow cricketers to reach their full potential as our current ageing facilities (many decades old!) are not fit for purpose and some have had to be closed down for safety concerns.

3. Build upon strong community links with local schools so everyone in our local community can benefit from our facilities with the resulting physical and mental health benefits from our sport.

Our community impact

We recognise that we play an important role in our local community. Based on census data Castle Point has the second highest number of households in Essex that are suffering deprivation across four different categories - education, employment, health and housing. 

Our club brings together a people regardless of background to share the physical and mental health benefits from our sport. Our hard work coaching cricket to young people develops lifelong skills such as teamwork, perseverance, and helps them feel a connection to the community. We support people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, recently including refugees. We ensure they kit to play cricket and go the extra mile to ensure they fit into our club and ultimately the local community.

We are always looking to expand our offer to the community, including opening our new facilities for the benefit of local schools, many of which do not have good quality facilities to coach cricket. We also work with local community groups to hire our clubhouse and are always welcoming to others wanting to use it.

2022 Commonwealth Games Local Legacy

Our crowdfunding campaign is being run in conjunction with an application for Sports England match-funding from the Places and Spaces Fund aiming to leave a legacy from the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games.

Women's cricket was introduced for the first time in the history of the Commonwealth Games in 2022 and our launch of women's cricket also in 2022 has been riding this wave of increased interest and participation in women's cricket across the country. 

We want to create a local legacy to the games through the installation of our practice net facility because we can’t currently give our women access to the training facilities they deserve. 

We have worked closely with Essex County Cricket Club and the England and Wales Cricket Board to ensure we have the right supplier to install these facilities in 2023. We have also secured planning permission from Castle Point Borough Council with unanimous support at full council.

How you can play your part?

1. Make a pledge to supporting the cause through our crowdfunder

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. Run your own fundraiser to support us, maybe a sponsored activity or similar, contact us and we can help you set-up a page linked to ours

4. Offer rewards! Get involved if you are a local business by donating items or services we can offer our supporters. We will give you a shout out

We are very grateful for all your donations and will include a list of our supporters on our club noticeboards in thanks to anyone who donates to our crowdfunder. 

We will also install a special board of thanks in our clubhouse for any individual, family or business who donates £50 or more to our crowdfunder. We recognise that your donation will create lasting benefits to our club and community for decades to come.