Island cricket enters new era

Island cricket enters new era

Jersey Cricket Board’s ‘My Club, My Journey’ initiative is providing over 160 juniors the chance to play competitive cricket through one of six clubs during the summer months, with much-valued weekly coaching sessions also building a base for development and future success at age-grade and senior levels.

Dedicated training will take place every week at Grainville, FB Fields, Les Quennevais and Farmers Field for the five Island cricket clubs and the JCB’s girls’ squad, the Lionesses, with youth sides set to enter under-11 and U13 league systems from the first weekend in July.

Premier Division clubs Walkovers, St Ouen-Springfield, Farmers and OVs and newly-formed Chirpys CC are all involved.

The initiative builds on the highly-popular Junior Super League, which featured squads from the local Premier Division alongside the Lionesses in 2018 and 2019.

Lee Meloy, JCB cricket development manager, said: ‘We launched the initiative earlier this year to replace the Super League, which has run for the last two seasons on Sunday mornings. The demand for that got so high that we had to look at upscaling but rather than just adding new teams we’ve made it into a two-level pathway, including U11s and U13s. They can now attend training sessions run by the club along with fixtures on alternate Sundays.

‘We’ve got four teams in the U13 league, from the four Premier League clubs, and then eight teams in the U11 league. We’ve now got what looks more like a proper club system, like you would have in the UK, and it allows us to give the clubs a framework to work within while the JCB take care of the governance and off-field side of things. It allows them to just focus on coaching cricket.

‘We’ve got 164 children signed up across the six clubs and we’re very happy with that.

‘We’re getting a few weeks of training in first, under the Covid guidelines, and then the fixtures programme will hopefully start on Sunday 5 July.’

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