All-Stars was launched five years ago, with Warwickshire Cricket Board supplying a coach for the first couple of years. In year three, Woodbourne was struggling to find an All-Stars coach from within its own ranks, and, as the parent of a second year All-Star, in desperation the club asked whether I would become the coach. I attended the Activators course and ran the All-Stars programme, really to make sure my son continued playing at Woodbourne. He had made friends there and we all liked the clubhouse facilities and family-friendly atmosphere.

That first season, as a new coach, I had twelve kids. However, I really enjoyed coaching and I got a lot more pleasure and satisfaction from running the programme than I had expected.

I returned as coach for my second season in 2020. The season was very stop/start with the pandemic regulations combining with some bad weather. I had twenty-nine kids on the All-Stars programme and we eventually finished the course on a dark, cold and windy night in late September. We were one of the few clubs that ran the course last year, and one of the few summer team sports that any of the local kids could join. Both kids and parents were glad of some small piece of normality in a difficult year.

2021 is now my third year as All-Stars coach. My initial aim was to get forty All-Stars and a further ten kids to join the new Dynamos programme. We contacted all the previous years’ parents to get them to re-join their kids during the priority booking window. I specifically promoted the Dynamos course to all the parents of kids aged eight years and over, hoping this would get us off to a good start. I posted on four local Facebook groups, plus Woodbourne Sports Clubs’ Facebook page and website too (hoping to entice some of their youth footballers to try cricket in their close season). At the same time, most of the local schools were visited by Warwickshire’s All-Stars team, to further promote All-Stars to the kids themselves (as opposed to their parents).

As the start dates of the courses approached, we were just about full. I held off any last-minute active promotion as I simply didn’t need it and I had reached my target of fifty kids across the two programmes. At that point, I hid the sign-up link on the All-Stars website. In those last two weeks, though, I was approached by parents who knew me or friends of theirs, or people who had tracked me down and I continued to accept a few more kids – children of parents who specifically wanted their kids either to come to Woodbourne or be coached by me. The final numbers are fifty-five All-Stars and twenty Dynamos – fifty percent more kids than I had targeted. I have a five-year plan to get to one hundred kids a year, which for Woodbourne will be in two years’ time. There is a strong chance we could get there (or close to it) a year early.

Sam Lewis has been the hard ball youth coach for three years now and we have tried to feed the older kids from All-Stars, and this year most of the Dynamos, into his hardball Under-11 and Under-13 teams. I have helped with some of the hard ball coaching as has another of the dads, who was himself a good club player in his youth. Whilst All-Stars and Dynamos will get kids into the club, we have to give kids options to progress to hard ball cricket and competitive age group fixtures if we want to keep them long-term

We have manged to get a further three All-Stars and Dynamos Activator’s through the training, so we now have a youth coaching team of six at the club, with both hard ball and soft ball cricket options available to new joiners. We have invested in some All-Stars Activator kit, so we all have matching hoodies and long trousers. We have had our names embroidered on these to help the kids to use our names. It also makes the coaches look like a professional coaching team, which gives the right first impression to new parents and kids. We believe this is important. We have set up three WhatsApp groups – one for All-Stars, one for Dynamos and one purely for the coaches. Important information, especially cancellations due to bad weather, are communicated through these.

The effect on Woodbourne has been very positive. Seventy-five kids means a bare minimum of seventy-five parents, all buying food and drink. We have managed to secure the services of a mobile stone-baked pizza van for the eight weeks and his takings (of which Woodbourne take a percentage) have been very good, proving this to be a popular additional amenity.

The revenue generated from the ECB club rebate will be re-invested into additional kit for both the hardball and softball youth sections. It will also be used to pay for ECB coaching courses so that we can raise the quality of coaching and the number of ECB qualified coaches.

Longer term, we are hoping that the kids being fed into the hardball section will start to play for the senior team and that will secure the long-term future of Woodbourne. For a club currently running only one (gradually ageing) senior team, we actually believe that the future looks very bright!”