CLUB IN FOCUS – Bulkington Cricket Club

In the lead up the 2021 season we want to focus on the hard work and preparation that has gone on at clubs around the County. We will get an insight from a leading light at a number of clubs as to how plans for the season have gone and what cricket is on offer at their clubs and how they have dealt with challenges.

I am in my second spell with the club, the first one was 2013-2015 and then again 2017 to present. I have held captaincy roles in the past but have been Head Coach since 2017.

Remarkably well. As a club we are running a Saturday 3rd Team for the first time in our history, this comes a year after we entered a 2nd XI into the midweek Nuneaton League in 2020 for the first time ever. We are also entering the National Village Knock Out for the first time too. We have just secured use of a third team ground, and we are also making steps to start a womens team this summer.

Now we have 3 senior teams, we want our 1st and 2nd XI’s to be challenging for promotion and start to look to move up the pyramid a bit. Our 3rd XI aims to provide social cricket and an opportunity for our talented youngsters to get their first taste of senior cricket. For us to maintain 3 senior Saturday and 2 midweek sides will be a huge effort for the club, but one I’m confident of achieving.

Off the field we have big plans. We feed into the main ‘sports and social’ club and they have huge plans to redevelop the pavilion. We are also raising funds for a new outdoor net facility, we have some funding from Sport England ready to go but just need to dot a few i’s and cross a few t’s. I guess while this is going on in the background our main aim off the field is to attract more children to the club and keep working hard to make it a welcoming club for the community. We have a few big clubs nearby as well so making sure we maintain our own uniqueness will help us to continue to grow and attract people to the club.

Just the uncertainty. We are preparing for a full season being able to start as normal and we feel we can be ready to play pretty quick once given the go ahead, but not really knowing how things are going to pan out is tough. The other problem we will face when things do start is the very little time any of our players have had in terms of training, like most clubs I’m sure, its the first time in ages we havent had a winter programme of sorts.

We try and engage with our local schools as much as we can. A couple of years ago we hosted a kwik cricket festival for a nearby school and off the back of that we saw a real drive in numbers at junior training nights. We also let our nearest secondary school (Nicholas Chamberlaine) use our ground for their school matches since the school no longer has a usable cricket strip. We are a village sandwiched between Nuneaton, Bedworth and Coventry, and very aware that our neighbouring clubs work with a lot of schools, so we do the best we can without stepping on anyones toes.

On the field we would like our first and second teams to be a couple of divisions higher, and to be still successfully running a third team. Off the field we would like to think we will have new outdoor nets and new changing facilities which will really transform the club. There was a couple of thousand pounds spent on cosmetic improvements to the pavilion last summer which created a real positive buzz about the place, as people start to believe in the development project we have when they could see things happening.

Volunteers. I would imagine as a club we are not alone in that. The jobs are shared round more nowadays but we always need more. Everything we do has to be sustainable and if we have more people doing more jobs is takes the pressure and burden off a select few.

The key thing for us from our junior section point of view is we regularly engage on our local village facebook community group about training nights/social events etc and that seems to be a really useful avenue for us to promote the club. People in the village are keen to support sport in the village so we usually get lots of traction from this. There is nothing we do that is out of the ordinary, just a committed group of people working very hard to promote the club.

I’ll give you two. But there are more! Jordan Glen is our club secretary and has pretty much become our head groundsman over the last 12 months. We have always struggled to maintain good pitches as we have relied on the local authority to do all the maintenance, but now we have someone dedicated to doing extra work. The square this winter has been managed superbly and is looking a lot healthier. Its a slow process getting a pitch up to standard but we have made a good start and should reap the benefits over the next few summers. We have invested heavily in our grounds equipment too, and were lucky to receive an ECB grant over the winter which enabled us to do more to the pitch.

The second mention should be Paul Upton. He took on the second team captaincy last season after we struggled in 2019,in terms of results and personnel, we often went to games with less than 11 players. The way Paul ‘rallied the troops’ in 2020 was fantastic, we were letting 5/6 players down every week that wanted a game so the turnaround was spectacular. He is also a great person to have to bring through juniors into senior cricket. He done that well, we have made him 3rd Team captain this season!!