Oakham Cricket Club to Trent Bridge challenge for young cricketers to raise funds for women’s and girls’ facilities
Young cricketers are to bowl the equivalent of 27 miles in one evening to raise money for their club’s flourishing women and girls’ section.
Oakham Cricket Club is hosting the fundraiser today (Friday, July 4) as part of a £30,000 campaign to improve facilities for female cricketers.
Members of the club’s Dynamos section, aged 11 to 13, have been challenged to bowl their way from Oakham to Trent Bridge, in Nottingham - the home ground of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club.
It means sending down a whopping 3,227 deliveries - each the 22-yard length of a cricket pitch - and is expected to take them around three hours.
“We're going to have our PA system up announcing where they are and we'll be plotting their route along the way,” said club president Nick Begy.
“We're going to have six pitches laid out for them to bowl on, and then when we get down to the final 100 balls, we're going to move onto the main square so we can have a bit of a finale.”
The club launched a women’s and girls section three years ago in a drive to expand the game’s reach.
“Three years ago, we literally had no women’s and girls’ cricket and we made a decision that was wrong and we needed to begin to grow it,” Nick said.
“It's really become our focus and it’s the best thing we can do to help the local community.
“We're a community club, and we're just trying to put something back.”
The drive quickly took off and the club now has a girls’-only Dynamo section of between 20 and 30 players.
And there are similar numbers in the women’s squad which plays matches across the county and region.
“We started off with just two or three girls training on a Friday and a women's section of nine or 10 on a Sunday,” Nick explained.
“We've now got to the point, three years later, where we've got the largest girls’ Dynamos section in Rutland and Leicestershire.
“We want to be the biggest girls’ and women's section in the county.”
Not only has it given the club’s membership a more than healthy boost, it has also provided fresh talent on the pitch.
“Some of the 13, 14-year-olds are now moving into the women’s cricket team, and some are then going into hardball cricket,” Nick explained.
“We've had some of the girls playing within our senior men's teams as well, so it's fantastic to see how they're growing and coming through the system.”
Yet the rapid rise has outgrown the facilities at their town centre home in Brooke Road, something a 10-strong group is aiming to put right.
They are on a mission to raise £30,000 for new women’s toilets and changing rooms through events, challenges and grants.
“We've been around 150 years catering for male cricket and we have not built an infrastructure for women's cricket,” Nick said.
“So we're looking to take this to the next stage and raise funds to build additional girls’ and women's facilities to allow us to continue to grow.”