Junior Club Captain’s Report

Post-Christmas we had 33 teams:

• 2 Youth
• 5 Section 1
• 7 Section 2
• 5 Section 3
• 9 Section 4

Pre-Christmas, we had an additional 3 Section 1 teams which converted to one of the youth teams after Christmas, and 2 of the Section 4 teams were new after Christmas.

Overall, the club had 412 players – 34 Yellow Caps, 300 Junior, 25 Youth and 53 Seniors.

New to the Club this year was Yellow Caps, a Weedons-branded skills programme replacing Have-a-go cricket. Ross worked hard to bring this to fruition and despite lower numbers, still managed to convert the same number of teams (2) to Section 4 for the second half of the season. There was a lot of things to be learned and we are expecting great things for next year.

A change for this season was the re-alignment of Youth Cricket. This is a Year 9/10 competition played in Country. This is now a calendar-year competition to align with Youth Cricket in the city which follows the calendar/school year.

Every year we have disruption with Section 1 teams and year 8 players leaving at the start of the new year. This year we put all year 8 players into year-8 only teams and entered them in the Section 1A competition. This went well and while some players left the Club for town schools and other reasons, we were able to enter a new youth team in the year 9/10 comp after Christmas.

A big highlight, for young and old, was 3 BlackCaps (Ross Taylor, BJ Watling and Neil Wagner) arriving at Weedons on 26 Feb. They participated in coaching sessions in an ANZ organised event.

It was a great chance for over half our junior players to get close to their heroes and have some fun and a sausage for the afternoon.

Our youth players helped run the drills along-side the BlackCaps and also benefited from some time with the BlackCaps coaching staff beforehand.

A lot of work was done behind the scenes by many club members to get set up for the day and ensure everything ran well on the day – including the BBQ!

Behind the scenes, there were some big changes for the Junior Club. These were:

1. Employing an admin
2. Establishing a junior committee
3. Creating Section Leader roles

This new structure has enabled the Club to continue to grow and thrive. Janine Grundler was appointed as administrator and has quickly come up-to-speed with the many aspects of running the Junior Club. 

Special thanks to the people who stepped up to join the Junior Committee, including our section leaders – Ben McFarlane, Stu Rooney, Peter Kearney and Mike Johnson. The start-of-season craziness was a little bit calmer with a team working on it this past season.

We were fortunate that COVID-19 did not have an impact on the season until the very end – with only 1 game lost at the end of the season. Prizegiving was a casualty as well, and Janine and Ross continued to do great work behind the scenes to ensure that we still had certificates, photos and trophies to get to players when lockdown restrictions were lifted.

With the new structure in place, we are well placed to continue to support the expected 10%+/year growth. Thanks to all those who have come on-board to be part of the Junior Committee and for those who continue to contribute to the Club at all levels.

Martin Welford
Co-Junior Club Captain – Weedons Rolleston Junior Cricket