The Somerset Cricket Foundation has expanded its girls' cricket offering as they make use of vital funds.
Amber Casely, Women and Girls’ Development Officer at the foundation, explained how the Metro Bank Girls in Cricket Fund has enabled them to expand their offer in the region.
Recruiting volunteers, connecting coaches, and recognising the hard work of those involved in the women and girls’ game have been top of Casely’s agenda and she is pleased by the progress that has been made.
“The Metro Bank Girls in Cricket Fund has allowed us to do so much more in areas that needed so much more,” Casely said. “It is not just that we're making strengths into super strengths – we're really concentrating on areas that need us, and we've been able to do that with the funding.
"The fund has allowed us to go in and help clubs recruit volunteers instead of just saying, 'oh, this is how you could recruit volunteers'.
"We also held a reward and recognition celebration for volunteers in our women and girls' game. We had 43 volunteers come and watch a women's game at Somerset and it was just really nice to be able to give back.
"Realistically, there's only one of me in my post, and we wouldn't be able to do the amount that we do with our women and girls' sections if we didn't have our volunteers. It was nice to be able to thank them and celebrate them.”
The Metro Bank Girls in Cricket Fund, launched in 2024 to grow and support the number of coaches and volunteers in girls’ cricket, has delivered almost 5,000 hours of coach mentoring, alongside training 461 coaches through the Metro Bank Girls in Cricket Fund ECB Core Coach programme, which is a coaching qualification specifically for existing and potential coaches of girls’ cricket.
One of the individual success stories of Somerset’s work is Lynda Northover, who was recently recognised at the county’s Cricket Collective Awards.
She won the Unsung Hero award for her work with Chard Cricket Club, where she now leads multiple youth teams while completing her coaching qualification. She has been supported in her coaching development by the foundation, which delivered a programme for coaches across the county that gave Northover a sense of belonging and a community to be a part of.
Casely added: “We had six coaches come along to one of our programmes. One of them was Lynda, and being able to watch her grow has just genuinely been one of the highlights of my three years in post.
"She's become so confident, and I think she felt instantly more relieved by the fact that she was coaching alongside others who were also coaching girls' cricket.
"They've become quite a strong core group of coaches and they have a WhatsApp group to share ideas.
"We were really able to give our time and dedication to those six, and we still have strong relationships with them now, which is really nice.”
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