A brilliant article by the Friendly Cricket Collective who are building communities and designing fun, friendly, meaningful cricket into busy people’s lives.
When we talk about our vision for the future, we often mention cricket binding communities together in neighbourhoods across the country.
There are undoubtedly places where cricket is already central to community life. On the other hand, there are places with little or no cricket at all. In some places, larger clubs are growing to an extent that smaller, community clubs are being crowded out. Unfortunately that often means the loss of smaller village clubs and grounds. And when this happens, it is for good.
Doing things differently
We live in an area of Bristol that has two larger cricket clubs within a couple of miles, but no cricket facilities in the neighbourhood.
Chatting to fellow parents at our daughter’s primary school, it was clear that these big clubs weren’t on the radar for most parents. The offer perceived as too serious and too heavy on commitment.
So we started something new
Initially it was a parent cricket group, then a parent cricket match. Gradually we’ve built a large community of adults and their families who enjoy meeting up to play and socialise around cricket – in the park, at the nets, and even hard ball matches against local friendly village sides. All of this unfolded because that’s what our group wanted.
Cricket has become an increasingly significant part of our lives, and we’re continually striving to expand our community. Meanwhile, we’re also doing things to make our cricketing activities more visible to the wider community.
At the end of the summer we came across two other casual cricket groups in our local area. Extras CC and Bristol Casual Cricket. Both of them had also decided to start their own cricket community, instead of joining an existing club. Loosely speaking, these new cricket groups have their roots in parks of south Bristol too.
This got us thinking about the potential for every neighbourhood to have a community like ours. It’s exciting to speak to people who are already making this happen and think of the fun to be had with some collaboration and friendly competition.
Cricket Neighbourhoods
We coined the term ‘cricket neighbourhood’ to describe a local area where cricket is being proactively used to enhance community life, and animate everyday spaces.
A cricket neighbourhood isn’t necessarily driven by a club. Nor does it require a formal cricket ground. It’s more flexible than that.
We’ve created a prototype in south Bristol by bringing lapsed cricketers together via primary school networks, and then designing fun, low-commitment cricket into our busy lives. We have a few scruffy local spots to play, some basic equipment, and WhatsApp communities to help us organise ourselves.
We plan to do even more to make our community better, and we now have an opportunity to support similar groups nearby – maybe by playing ‘pick-up’ games against them, shared nets, and working towards greater collective visibility.
Everything mentioned above renews our enthusiasm to design cricket into community life… without relying on traditional clubs to do it all.
We believe every cricket neighbourhood should be unique, reflecting its people and places. But there are some common pillars that seem to be important for each one to thrive:
- A community leader(s)
- Places to play
- Access to basic cricket equipment
- Communication channels to enable organisation and promotion of group activities
- An open-minded attitude about what cricket should look like, and where it can be played
There’s also the scope for more mature cricket neighbourhoods to include sub-groups or teams within them too. In Windmill Hill we have primary parent cricket teams and a nomadic friendly side (the South Bristol Sundries). All are formed within a small geographic area, they coexist with some crossover in membership.
If you’re aware of other informal cricket groups and communities, please let us know. We’d really like to get to know them and explore opportunities together, wherever they are. We’ve even added new layers to the Friendly Cricket Map to denote primary parent cricket groups and other casual cricket communities.
Looking ahead
We’re currently exploring ways to raise funding needed to develop, test and prove the cricket neighbourhoods concept and expand beyond south Bristol.
If you’re interested to find out more or you’d like to support this journey, please get in touch for a chat. We’re on friendlycricketcollective@gmail.com
Notes:
Thank you to Jonathan Champion for help writing and editing this post. Jonathan is the Author of Getting Out, a new book that tells the story of Ukraine’s cricketers escaping from Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
Credit Andy, Ben & Rachel @ The Friendly Cricket Collective for this article and you can find more about The Friendly Cricket Collective at the below links:
https://x.com/PeoplesCricket
https://linktr.ee/peoplescricket
You can find the original post @ https://medium.com/@friendlycricketcollective/cricket-neighbourhoods-12a6ed074c48
