The county and club network is the bedrock of cricket in England and Wales. It provides the foundations for progressing the game at every level, from children picking up a bat and ball for the first time at their local club, to future England heroes developing their skills in elite domestic competitions. ECB funding of new infrastructure have enabled the likes of Higham CC to survive and grow while at first-class level investment in technology is bringing the game to even more fans.
The growth of Higham CC, in South Yorkshire, over the past seven years is a tale of devotion and dedication and the importance of good, inclusive facilities.
Higham is a rural club on the outskirts of Barnsley and in 2015, the future looked bleak. They could barely get a single men’s team out on a Saturday and the club’s inadequate facilities made it hard to attract new members.
“We were staring down the barrel,” recalls Dan Bamforth, then still a player and now the club’s business manager. “We had a get together – are we going to carry on, and make a fist of it or are we just going to shut the doors? We decided to put some time into it and make it work.” In order to build a serviceable pavilion, funding was acquired from Sport England and local grants. The new facilities opened in 2018 but an unintended consequence was that Higham quickly outgrew its surroundings.
“It’s an interesting journey,” explains Luke Woodhouse, the club chair. “We went from having literally no facilities, no toilets, no running water to the new pavilion which at the time was outstanding. We were attracting so many more players that it actually became unviable. It’s a nice problem to have, but we never envisaged it.”
From fielding one eight-man team in 2015, Higham now had two men’s teams in the Yorkshire Southern Premier League and a Sunday XI in the Barnsley League, two women’s teams and a junior section. There are more than a hundred playing members.
The standard pavilion with a couple of smallish changing rooms wasn’t cutting it. Assisted by a grant of £150,000 from the ECB ‘Welcoming Environments’ initiative, Higham have been able to build an additional facility that houses three changing rooms, cubicle showers and an umpires’ changing room. “We have an option for a multi-use area which we just didn’t have before,” says Woodhouse. “It allows us to maximise our space and host more than one event at once.”
Higham is also now an ECB Disability Champion Club and a hub site for the Yorkshire disability programme. The new changing rooms were designed to be fully accessible and have a level access route in and out.
The growth of the women’s section has been one of the major success stories for Higham. Andrea Stevenson has been associated with the club since childhood. “I started as a scorer and then I played for the men’s sides right through to 1986. I’m also a committee member and work behind the bar – I’m basically a general dog’s body!”
Stevenson has tried to set up a women’s section at Higham over the years but with no success, until now. “It was part of the process of rebuilding the club,” she says. “We thought we’d stick some posters up – offer ’em prosecco and a bit of pizza. It just blossomed from there – it was unreal. At the first training session, there were about half a dozen, ten the next week and it just grew. Last year we put two sides out every week and the first team were runners-up in the county finals.”
It started with a softball festival, then league softball teams and now there’s a women’s hardball team. One of Natalie Horner’s friends suggested she could give cricket a go. “It was a really good laugh and everyone was very friendly,” she says. “I started playing indoor matches and it became a bit addictive. Before I knew it, I was playing in ladies’ matches on a Sunday morning then a men’s match in the afternoon.”
The club has five female committee members and has at least 50% female participation in its All Stars and Dynamos programmes. When one of the women’s coaches bumped into Barnsley’s own Katherine Brunt in a local coffee shop, they couldn’t help but proudly tell the England pace bowler about the strides being taken at Higham. A while later, two England shirts arrived at the club – one signed by Brunt, the other by team-mate and partner Nat Sciver. That’s the ultimate seal of approval.