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Who are we?

Stony Stratford CC is a well-established family-friendly and fully inclusive organisation with a history dating back over 150 years. We run five senior sides in the Northamptonshire Cricket League together with two Women’s teams, a Sunday side and a highly successful junior set-up featuring more than 260 young cricketers from U5 to U19 level.

The club welcomes players of all abilities and delivers a great participant experience whilst also enabling those with talent to fulfil their potential and access county pathways. 

We are committed to retaining young people in sport and are exceptionally good at integrating youngsters of both genders into our senior sides.

We have the only women and girls’ section in the whole of Milton Keynes and are one of only six in the whole of Buckinghamshire, and we continue to rapidly grow this branch of our club.

Parents are encouraged to attend as spectators or take this further by volunteering as coaches (which many do) or in other roles, behind the scenes.

Why are we crowdfunding?

In the past 10-15 years our club has doubled in size and the net lane system we have in place at the moment is no longer fit for purpose.

We are an ambitious club with our senior men's 1st XI targeting a return to the Premier Division of the Northamptonshire Cricket League.

Our nets are well over a decade old and are tired, damaged and no longer offer the kind of training environment we wish to provide the members of our club, young and old.

In a recent survey that we undertook with our club members, we received strong feedback that our training facilities needed improvement and we are acting upon this very clear message from our members.

How we’ll spend the money raised

We are raising a total of £58,000 to replace our old system with a new and resilient practice system that will help increase the attractiveness of the club to prospective junior and senior players. More importantly, it will assist the club's retention of junior and senior players by providing increased on-site facilities and subsequently allowing coaches and leaders to provide year-round coaching sessions.

We have applied for several grants to supplement our project, and we have an active programme of events scheduled across the season to fundraise, but this Crowdfunder appeal will be a huge part of whether we are able to improve our facilities for our club's community.

The money will provide an ECB-approved three-lane 27m open facility that will meet the demands of the club and will provide a safe, performance-led facility in which to hold warm-ups, coaching, drills, skills and net practice. 

Community impact of our club

Community Events

SSCC is a large part of the county's cricketing community and a valued part of the local community in the historic town of Stony Stratford.

We host one of the town's largest local events every July with our annual Beer and Prosecco Festival which provides a safe and family-friendly event for local residents to enjoy. 

It gives a platform to local aspiring music talents on our open-mic night and gives the opportunity for other local businesses to benefit from the 1,500 strong footfall over the course of the weekend.

It is a hugely enjoyable outdoor event for all and a valued part of the town's calendar of events, bringing the community together and forging new friendships.

Supporting local businesses

We are proud of our impressive growth over the past decade and we always look for ways that our community can support local businesses.

Junior training on a Friday night sees over 150 children learning new skills whilst their parents enjoy watching on and enjoying a well-earned end-of-the-week drink. Over the past several seasons, we have offered the evening slot to a variety of different food vendors. We offer this at no charge and enjoy being able to provide a captive (and hungry) audience to support small businesses.

Supporting the growth of local cricket clubs

Following our growth, it has been impossible to host the volume of games we need to in order to fulfil all of the fixtures for our senior and junior sides. As such, we have reached out to a number of local cricket clubs who all benefit from the fees we pay to use their facilities, making their clubs more financially stable.

In addition, we also supply two of these clubs, Hanslope CC and Thornborough CC, with some of our older youth players to supplement their senior weekend sides which keeps cricket alive in the village, whilst also offering development opportunities for our youth players.

Our latest partnership with Thornborough CC has seen us support and mentor their coaches as they seek to grow their youth programme, and we are delighted to see that their junior section is seeing impressive growth. 

We look forward to suppporting this village team - that was once a senior-only club - develop their youth section even more to keep the hugely important English tradition of village cricket alive.

We also offer our ground free of charge to local schools to use for daytime fixtures.

Providing memorable experiences for our community

Over the past three seasons, we have invited several local clubs to partake in an IPL-style tournament where young kids are given the chance to enjoy our sport in a completely different way to a regular one-off match. 

The tournament, that has seen U10s, U11s and U12s enjoying the experience of a hardball tournament, features music to walk out to and bursts of songs for boundaries and wickets and announcements throughout the matches.

We look to make memories for our players that extend beyond just the playing side and hope to provide experiences and friendships that last a lifetime - not only for the players at our club, but for the players who visit.

Softball tournament

The tournament format was developed last season to softball cricket and we offered 16 sides of six players aged 9 and under for boys, or 11 and under for girls, the experience of playing in a tournament that offered a pathway to a final for stronger sides, but also a festival of cricket with cross-over games for teams made up of players with very little match practice. Some of these children will only have been practising skills in training, so giving them the chance to experience matches in a fun and exciting setting was welcomed by all who participated.

We also sought to provide young people with the chance to have a first taste of umpiring, scoring and managing and encouraged them to have a go at aspects of the game they may not have experienced before, because as we all know, a successful sports club isn't just about the players on the pitch - it's about creating an environment where everyone can thrive, no matter what part of the game they are interested in.

It was a hugely popular event and one that we will be repeating year after year with teams from all over Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire coming together to learn, enjoy and fall in love with the multitude of positive benefits - social, mental and physical - that our sport brings.

How you can play your part

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

1. Make a pledge. Don’t delay if you’re going to support us because momentum is key to our success! Don't forget to add gift aid to your donation if you can and where it is applicable.

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. Fundraise for us. If you want to run your own fundraiser – 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!