Pannal Cricket Club New Practice Nets

Who are we?

WELCOME TO PANNAL CC

Pannal CC have been playing cricket in and around the village of Pannal, North Yorkshire since 1874, Whether you want to play, help out, or just watch, you will always be made very welcome at our small but friendly club.

We are only a small volunteer led village cricket club but with a huge history of success and producing an array of talented cricketers. Our players have gone on to play representative cricket at Nidderdale, North Yorkshire and Yorkshire age group level. We even have representation at Yorkshire Diamonds, so we know what it takes to breed talent. 

With close to 300 members across all our junior girls, boy and senior teams, we need to upgrade some of our facilities to match the ambitions of our players.

Why are we crowdfunding?

We are so fortunate to have one of the most successful Junior sections in the area. Friday nights through the season at the club are a joy to behold with children as young as 5 taking part in organised cricket. We consistently have over 220 children participating in cricket on a weekly basis throughout the season (180 Juniors and 40 All Stars). We were the first club in the junior league to enter a dedicated girls team, who competitively competed against boys and mixed sex teams and even made it to a cup semi final in 2022. Pannal now can boast 13 Junior Teams, and 4 Senior Teams which includes an over 50's ensemble (3 of those Senior teams actually gained promotion in their relevant leagues last season). A lot of this has been introduce since Covid to try and increase revenues for the club and put us back on a footing similar to that of our Pre Covid successes.

Quite simply, our aim is to give these kids every opportunity possible to excel and be the best cricket version of themselves they can be. This doesn't just stop at the juniors may I add, but, our Senior teams and other cricketers in our local community.

We are not fortunate enough to have a daily revenue stream coming into our club like others around us, so we need your support to help make our dream a reality. As with many other clubs similar to ours, we were hit really hard during Covid 19. Basically we had to close the doors, with little or no income during this period but still incurring costs of ground rent, maintaining the ground and carrying on with the general upkeep of the facility. During this period we were also hit with storm damage to the roof of the clubhouse, meaning we ended up having to replace the whole roof to stop irreparable damage to the internals of the clubhouse. In fact some of this work still needs finishing off but due to budget constraints it has had to be put on the back burner (anything that we may have left over from this crowdfunding project will go towards finishing these bits off). This Winter then saw the storm damage that finally finished off the last of the nets practice facility, even picking up part of the artificial surface and depositing it elsewhere. Hence, the need to raise this money to get these replaced. I'm sure you'll agree they look extremely sad now.

It roughly costs us in the region of £25,000 a year to run our club. We just about break even on an annual basis so there isn't much wriggle room left for big ground developments like this. Luckily, we have been successful in applying for a grant from the ECB to go towards the cost of the new nets. But, this means we still have to raise £20,000 of the £40,000 needed for the new nets investment into the Cricket Club.

How we’ll spend the money raised

The money will be used to build a brand new 2 net practice facility from groundworks up. 100% of all funds raised will go towards the development of the practice facilities at the ground. Our finished product should look something similar to this:

Community impact

Our club is a vital part of the local community in Pannal & Burnbridge. The ground has hosted many a Gala or event for the Parish and we want to continue to be able to do this for years to come. In order to achieve this, we need to make sure we invest in the facilities to enable us to provide a strong and stable club for the future generations of Pannal Cricket Club. The past 12 months has seen the demise of many clubs similar to ours, to avoid this, we need the support of the whole community to get behind projects like this. That way, we are all part of the success of this great little cricket club.

Commonwealth Games 2022

We were delighted to see Women's cricket was introduced at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. Our girls saw women's cricket on TV for the first time (some of our girls even went to watch a few games!) and we noticed an increase in girls at practice after the Games. Our new nets will give these girls much greater hard ball practice as they get older. We already have a Northern Diamonds player and 2 Yorkshire age group girls, who are great role models for the juniors. We hope that the momentum gained from Birmingham 2022 continues into this season and beyond.

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!

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!