Sport Northern Ireland Project Re-Boot: Activate has provided £5,000 of match funding
Waringstown Cricket Club - Women and Girls
Craigavon, Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon, United Kingdom
Aim
Waringstown Cricket Club aim to use this crowdfunding project to help support the growth and development of our women and girls sections.
Our Club
Although Covid-19 has thrown up many challenges for local sports clubs, Waringstown CC has continued to increase our membership numbers. We are one of the most successful clubs in the country with 6 All-Ireland trophies.
Cricket allows boys and girls from across the community the opportunity to be involved in a team environment and therefore helps them to develop key life skills for the future. At Waringstown we ensure that all the kids in our system are given equal opportunities to play and develop at the level they find themselves. We have ran a women’s section for many years, in 2022 making it to the Gallaghers Challenge Cup final, narrowly losing to CSNI. We began offering free U13 girl’s sessions in 2022 with great success. We want to build on this for 2023.
Why is this important?
Waringstown are looking to start a schools programme in the local community to help engage with these stakeholders and create a sustainable practice which can help put the building blocks in place for the future. This would enable the club to continue to develop male and female cricketers and put in place the building blocks for our future.
Like most local sports clubs, Waringstown are dependent on volunteers to give up their time to keep the club in good order. To keep expanding our club and our youth section, we need to get more coaches and provide more equipment than we ever have. At the same time, we are also determined to keep our membership fees as low as possible, in order to make cricket, and the opportunities it offers, affordable and available to all.
Covid-19 meant that we were unable to run sessions for our women and girls groups as well as significant drop in income due to lack of in person events. It was clear that a lack of technical coaching had negatively affected our teams as well as game awareness skills not being developed. We hope that your support can make up for these issues and we can make up for lost time.
Our Project
Our season starts in April and we are hoping to begin our junior girls programme straight away along with our senior women. We require your support to ensure we have the best facilities and equipment to support our women and girls’ sections.
Your support will enable us to:
- Delivering our schools programme to 2 primary and 2 secondary schools in the ABC Council area. This programme will run from 8-10 weeks starting after the Easter holidays until the end of the school term. We will be delivering afterschool cricket along with helping to facilitate inter-school matches between our target schools. This is targetted at increasing participation and increasing numbers at the earliest stage of our club girls programme.
- Buy suitable bats and balls to ensure that all age groups have the appropriate training equipment.
- Train and develop our coaches to help build our capacity for the future.
- Buy pads, gloves and helmets so that our participants can experience cricket without parents having to worry about this expense.
- Deliver our summer cricket programme to develop our senior and junior female cricketers to represent Waringstown. We will use our schools coaches and senior players to help coach the juniors, to help ease them into the club and show them a familiar face.
We aim to have both a Womens 1XI, an U13 Girls and many friendlies for newcomers in our season. Through our youth programme, we hope our players will continue to develop the values that come through organised sport, whilst building friendships that will last into their adult lives.
Thank you for considering supporting the Waringstown Cricket Club Women and Girl’s Programme.
This project successfully funded on 8th April 2023