Target reached!
Our target of £6000 will enable us to buy the cricket square mower and pitch mower t...
Project Safe Surface
Aylsham, England, United Kingdom
Aim
Our aim is to provide a safe, improved playing surface for our ever growing club, for our juniors and new women's teams to enjoy.
About Us
Aylsham St Giles Cricket Club have developed beyond all recognition in the last few years, and now represent a genuine community club. Our successful men's section fields two Saturday sides - the firsts play in Norfolk League Division One (title winners 2019), and the seconds have just been crowned champions of Division Four North East in 2021, and gained promotion.
Our new Women's softball team, started only this year, are recruiting new playing members every week, playing in the Norfolk Women's Softball league. This is a tremendous development for the club, with the team practicing every week and looking to improve their skills. A natural progression will be to ultimately field both a Women's hardball team, as skill levels grow, and a Women's softball team.
Our junior section is just fantastic - every Wednesday night dozens of boys and girls, aged 5 to 13 take part in the ECB Allstars and Dynamos initiatives, plus we have hardball training for the under 13s. Teams are fielded at under 9, 11 and 13 level. This is the first year for our under 13 side, playing hardball cricket in the Norfolk Alliance junior competition.
We are rightly proud of our multi ethnic background, with strong links forged with the Bangladeshi and Indian communities throughout Norfolk, with around a dozen playing members from these communities.
How Covid has impacted us
With a growing club, so the need to improve our facilities has continued apace every year. Through 2017 to 2019 we hosted 3 excellent fundraising dinners, with celebrity guest speakers from the world of cricket. This enabled us to raise £9,000 over this period, which was used to improve our astroturf practice net facility, to buy loads of junior playing equipment, and to buy a fantastic new electric scoreboard.
Pictured: Henry Blofeld addresses our 2018 fundraising dinner
Covid has prevented us from hosting a repeat dinner in both 2020 and 2021. We were in lock down through most of 2020. Even though we are now coming out of lockdown, it takes months to arrange each dinner - from arranging guest speakers to organising corporate sponsors' tables, the uncertainty caused by Covid means that we had to shelve plans for a 2021 dinner months ago. This has caused a £6,000 hole in our finances, needed to finance our next projects. This is why we are using Crowdfunder instead.
Our Project
With increased playing numbers, so the use of our cricket square at Aylsham Recreation Ground increases every year. We have a duty of care to ensure that our juniors are playing on a safe and reliable surface.
To ensure this happens, we are taking the pitch preparation in house, having historically used outside contractors. By taking control of pitch preparation, we firmly believe that we can improve the playing surface, because we have a vested interest in trying to achieve perfection. Outside contractors will always have to work to a time budget.
The downside of this is that we need a lot of expensive machinery to ensure that the playing surface is prepared to suitable levels. This equipment has historically been provided by the outside contractors, so now we need to buy our own.
So that's what this Crowd Funding exercise is all about - to buy and maintain the machinery to prepare the best possible surfaces for our great community club. The essential equipment that we need to achieve this goal includes:
- Cricket Pitch mower £3,200
- Cricket Square mower £1,500
- Combi rake £ 700
- Essential roller & outfield mower maintenance £ 700
- White lining equipment £ 400
TOTAL £6,500
We have some funds to go towards this target, but need to raise an additional £6,000 in total.
Sport England: Active Together has provided £1,800 of match funding
This project successfully funded on 11th October 2021