Professional cricketer Phoebe Graham has agreed to become Harrogate Cricket Club’s ambassador for women and girls’ cricket.
Graham, who is contracted to Yorkshire County Cricket Club and the Northern Diamonds, will provide regular girls coaching.
She will also act as a consultant to the club on how to expand its number of female players and grow the game in the Harrogate district.
Graham, who is a fast bowler and qualified coach, will advise the club on formulating a schools’ programme to encourage more girls to take up cricket and help it work with other clubs in the area to promote women and girls’ cricket.
The club currently includes about 25 girls, whose season is due to start next month.
For the first time ever, Harrogate’s girls’ section has entered a team in to the Nidderdale under-13 boys league this summer.
Graham, who also runs a gender equality consultancy, will now build on work done by head junior coach Andy Hawkswell, along with Nat Crossland and Tim Robinson to further develop the girls’ section.
Club chairman Steve Clark said:
“This new partnership is an incredibly exciting one. We hope it will be a long-lasting relationship that ensures that women and girls’ cricket continues to grow and thrive in Harrogate.”
Graham said:
“Providing women and girls with opportunities to play sport is something that I am extremely passionate about and I love Harrogate’s commitment and long-term ambitions to grow the female section.”
Read more:
- Fire, bankruptcy and coronavirus: Harrogate Cricket Club adapts to survive
- Cricket club to benefit from major Bilton Hall refurbishment
Cricket club to benefit from major Bilton Hall refurbishment
Bilton in Ainsty Cricket Club look set to build a new state-of-the-art pavilion thanks to a major refurbishment of Bilton Hall.
The club’s ground is on the Bilton Hall Estate near York but the club could only get funding from the England Cricket Board to build a new pavilion if they owned the land. So the Lloyd family, which owns the estate, stepped in to offer to pay for it.
The family is currently undergoing a multi-million-pound refurbishment of Bilton Hall.
Phil said it was an “amazing opportunity” to replace the previous wooden pavilion which is on its last legs. He said the new structure will cost six figures and will also include new changing rooms, a kitchen and a club room.
He added:
“Gifts like that don’t come across often.”
Phil said the village club regularly punches above its weight and last season played against bigger hitters such as Scarborough, Ripon, Easingwold.
Bilton Hall.
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The club recently submitted a planning application for the new pavilion and Phil said he hopes the parish council and Harrogate Borough Council can get behind it. He said it will be a “facility the local community can be proud of”
He added:
Indoor sports clubs face uncertain future under changing covid rules“I have played for the cricket club for my whole life. We’re all mates who have grown up together and now had children. The club is a focal point for the community.”
Indoor sports clubs say they can only hope they’ll be able to reopen after changes to government guidelines forced them to close their doors.
Any indoor sport with more than six adult participants has now been banned from today, after being exempt from the ‘rule of six’ introduced last week.
In Harrogate, some indoor sports clubs say the future looks “worrying” as they don’t know when they’ll be able to re-open – or whether their members will return.
Andy Hawkswell, founder of Harrogate Indoor Cricket League, said:
“It was a bit of a shock and of course very disappointing. We had 14 to 16 teams playing in the league this year – the demand was high because the summer season was halved.
“It’s worrying that after having so much time off, they may not come back. For a lot of the players, there is a huge social aspect to the game and they will miss out on that now.
“Unfortunately it’ll probably be a year out and we’ll have to hope there’s enough interest for next year if people return.”
This troop has had to suspend training again with its coach looking for employment elsewhere.
Megan Fairweather runs the Fire and Ice Cheerleading squad in Harrogate. It is a youth team, but some members are over 18 so the exclusions still apply.
The squad was only set up in September 2019, leaving Megan without financial support. She worries that with further delays the members won’t return.
She said:
“We haven’t been open since March – we were planning to reopen this week but we’ve had to cancel that. The government has come out with a list and because cheerleading isn’t registered as an official sport yet, it wasn’t put on the list.
“It’s a lot more complicated because it’s a contact sport. Even if we were to open with just strength and conditioning training some of the troop may drop it because they come to do stunts and they can do those at their gymnastics or dance classes.”