NEW NOTTINGHAMSHIRE JUNIOR CRICKET STRUCTURE LAUNCHED

Junior cricket in Nottinghamshire is in the throes of a reinvention.

With the sport facing a battle for attention in the modern age, and with stalwart volunteers shouldering a heavy workload, a more centralised, innovative, integrated and inclusive county-wide structure aims to harness strong interest levels and smooth the pathway to the adult game.

Ben Thompson first picked up a cricket bat almost before he could walk.

Cricket was a family affair in his Oxfordshire village, and the sport has remained a part of his working life and his free time ever since.

Now, as Chair of Nottinghamshire Junior Cricket, he is determined to ensure the next generation have ample opportunities to keep their passion for the game alive.

This summer sees a reorganisation of junior cricket in the county. Formerly the preserve of four separate regional structures in Bassetlaw, Newark, Mansfield and Nottingham, grassroots cricket for young people in the county will now all be brought together under one roof.

It is, Ben hopes, a plan which leaves junior cricket equipped to thrive in the modern era.

“The history of cricket in Nottinghamshire is very strong, and we haven’t got a problem with producing lots of good young cricketers,” he says. “But I think everyone in the county recognised that the volunteer base was dwindling, as it is across all grassroots sports.

“We needed to just focus on how we could do things better and more efficiently, and ultimately work towards growing cricket across the county together.

“Cricket in general is a sport in good health. Participation in junior cricket is up, and T20 cricket and The Hundred have really helped improve visibility – particularly on the girls’ side, which is a huge growth area.

“If we can harness that interest in the right way, things can only continue to go in the right direction.” At the heart of the new structure is a focus on a more tailored offering, adjusted for ability, to stop players falling out of the game when progressing through the age groups.

“One of the key things is making sure we can offer appropriate cricket for all,” continues Ben. “Because we’ve brought the county all together, we’re actually able to facilitate cricket that is appropriate for every level of the game.”

Sam Johnson, one of Nottinghamshire’s Club and League Officers, warms to the theme. “We work closely with the ECB on the delivery of their national programmes (All Stars, for 5-8-year-olds, and Dynamos, for 8-11-year-olds), and we noticed quite significant drop-off rates when children finished Dynamos age and wouldn’t have an appropriate offer for them to continue playing,” he says.

“If kids have only been playing cricket for one or two years before they finish Dynamos, then they’re thrown straight into an U11s game with a hardball, playing 20 overs per side, it can be a pretty lonely evening. “We see the same thing after under 15s, when young people are at GCSE age and have a lot of competing interests outside of playing cricket – so at both ages, we want to offer something to keep people in the game and allow them to grow and develop at their own pace.

“That’s meant introducing things like an U17s Hundred competition, which has all the same pizzazz as the U19s Hundred that we already run – the coloured kits and pink balls – but provides a bridge for those teams that enjoy playing together but haven’t currently got anywhere to go.”

Ben continues: “when we think about junior cricket, the first thing you think is hardball games, eleven-a-side. But if you look at the formats that are out there, that’s actually only a very small part of what’s happening. There are a lot of incrediball (a hybrid ball) games and eight-a-side matches taking place, for example.

“We’ve got to provide a pathway from the very start of a cricketing journey all the way into adult or representative cricket – and make sure people aren’t overawed by the equipment or the rules of the game.

“Moving to a countywide structure will mean that – where we might have struggled to run certain programmes before because there were only two or three teams in the area, now we might be able to find ten teams across a wider area.

“From an innovation point of view, we might not run fixtures in the way we always have – at evenings or weekends – we might find that some formats work better in a festival-type environment.

“This is a blank sheet of paper, and I’m very excited and honoured that we’ve got the opportunity to create something completely from scratch. You don’t get the opportunity to do that in life very often.”

The new structure also aims to ease the burden on volunteers, whose love for the game remains precious.

“There’s an incredible knowledge base out there,” says Sam. “We’ve got people involved in this new structure that have been running junior cricket leagues for 20 or 30 years, and we can’t lose any of that experience.

“What we can do, though, is bring it all together in one place rather than having volunteers operating in silos across the county.

“We know that volunteer fatigue can be massive, too, if people have been doing the same jobs for that length of time. You see it all the time – if you need a job doing, it ends up being done by the volunteer that’s already doing a million other things.

“If we can take some of the stress away from people, and make sure they’ve got time to actually enjoy what they’ve created, that will be really satisfying.”

The early signs are promising: the number of teams who have entered junior competitions for 2025 has risen by more than 50, and now stands at 350 across the county. Each of the new formats has attracted sufficient interest to be operational in this first year of the new structure.

A sport that almost revels in its steep learning curve, and its wealth of formats, is pulling in the same direction.

“You look at racquet sports, where you’ve got pickleball, padel and tennis all fighting each other in a sense, and you realise how fortunate we are that we’re so well integrated,” says Ben. “Yes, we’ve got different formats, but ultimately, it’s all cricket – and we just want people to be playing and enjoying cricket, whatever the format.

“I think by bringing this all together under the under the banner Nottinghamshire Junior Cricket, we’re making that make sense to the youngsters that will be leading the game into the future."