Making our game best in the world

Pete Ackerley, Head of Development at ECB, outlines why the growing strength of recreational cricket in England and Wales is a continuing good news story for the game (this article was previously published in the programme for the 1st npower Test v West Indies)

My vision is that by 2013 we will be the world leaders in Cricket Development, and we are already a long way down the road to that goal.

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Any lasting structure has to be built upon strong foundations and that is why around £50 million of revenue and capital funding has been invested into the development of the recreational game throughout England and Wales in the past five years.

Working in line with the ECB’s Strategic Plan, ‘Building Partnerships 2005 to 2009’, we have achieved significant – indeed, almost revolutionary – success across all areas.

For instance, a year ahead of schedule, the ECB accredited the vital Clubmark status on its 1,000th club last summer. At the latest count, there are more than 1250 cricket clubs with this accreditation, plus another 1300 actively working towards it.

This is clear proof of an increase in standards of club facilities and coaching at grassroots level. ECB Clubmark, by definition, means a quality-assured environment which is safe and secure for young children.

There are about 3700 clubs with junior sections in England and Wales, and so to have more than 2500 of them either with Clubmark, or working towards it, is tremendous news for parents, teachers and coaches as well as for our thousands of aspiring young cricketers.

Participation levels in cricket have also soared, as a direct result of our development policies and initiatives. Last year we saw a 24 per cent increase in the numbers playing recreational cricket, and it was 27 per cent across the board in 2007.

In 2008 alone there was a 49 per cent rise in the numbers of girls and women playing cricket, and a 137 per cent rise in disabled participation. In school years 5, 6 and 7 there was a 48 per cent increase.

The development programmes of our 39 County Boards, plus the Cricket Foundation’s ‘Chance to shine’ campaign, must take a lot of the credit for these figures. However, the impact of our funding and facilities initiatives has been a huge factor in influencing rising participation figures at all levels of the recreational game.

In 2008 the ECB, together with public funding, contributed more than £8 million of investment in club capital project programmes, and that in turn levered in an additional £19.7 million of partnership funding. Around £28 million, therefore, was invested into recreational cricket last year: a tremendous figure.

Much of this is as a result of clubs realising that, through ECB’s development programmes and those of the County Boards, there is a lot of help – both financial and operational help – that we can give them, if they want to help themselves.

When ECB was formed in 1997 the budget for recreational cricket funding was just £2.5 million, so you can see why massive increases in the level of financial help has already benefited significant numbers of clubs.

Meanwhile, between the Ashes summer of 2005 and this npower Ashes summer we will have qualified more than 10,000 new cricket coaches. We now have more than 12,000 members of our Coaches Association, and more than 40,000 coaches in total. They are all supported and helped to improve their skills further by a comprehensive continuous professional development programme.

I also want to acknowledge here the truly massive achievement of an enormous army of volunteers around the country, without whom no club or league or County Board could function so efficiently.

We have around 200 professional development staff working either directly for ECB or for their County Boards, and these staff are complemented and backed up by the dedication and commitment to cricket by all our wonderful volunteers.

The next four years, from 2010 until 2013, is now the subject of a new Strategic Plan, on which I have been working hard for some time.

In this, our biggest challenge – and one which we will be concentrating on – is how best we can retain in cricket those junior players who reach 16 and leave the game, for all sorts of reasons, and also how we can seek to involve more and more adults, whether it be as players, as umpires or scorers, or as coaches and helpers or in administrative positions.

Overall, we must seek to build on the great advances that have been made in the past five years and the massive difference they have made to the game. We must now bed it down, and create long-term sustainable growth towards that aim of making our recreational cricket structure the best in the world.