2025 will be our third year as a club, and whilst we continue to evolve and look at how we can best help enable diversity and inclusivity in cricket, we are pretty settled in the approach we are taking with our teams and fixtures.
Our approach is to help cricketers with ability and desire to challenge themselves to reach a standard where their ability would allow them to play league cricket. We do this by putting out diverse and inclusive teams made up from a mix of experienced and developing players and play against established league teams. Two key objectives: to introduce the developing players to league cricket whist at the same time introduce league cricket to a pool of players they may not have traditionally looked at for their league teams.
We have identified four groups to work with: Disability, LGBTQ+, Girls and Woman, and Development (Juniors into Senior Cricket). We have five LGBTQ+ Team fixtures and one Development Team fixture confirmed.
The Girls and Woman’s team will hopefully take to the field at least once this year, and our objective is to establish some momentum for the Disability team, which we are still expanding our own knowledge about.
Chris has already shared his plans for 2025 on his own blog, and they naturally have an impact on how much cricket we can play: with a maximum of twenty Staffordshire Seniors First XI fixtures and eighteen Church Eaton Second XI fixtures (he won’t be playing in the T10, T20 or Sunday games) that is quite a lot of cricket (and travel). Add in the six confirmed NBCC fixtures and a (self imposed) maximum of four charity games that is a total of 48 games he will be available for IF selected (and fit)!
As you can see we don’t put out a Social Team as there are already a lot of great options for players wanting to play social cricket. Our strength is combining our coaching and mentoring skills with playing competitive cricket, although we will provide players for social cricket if teams are short so feel free to ask!