Chance to Shine – a brief review

An article by Stephen Pritchard    No Comments

The Devon Cricket Board requested a review of our project to include in material they will distribute to future participant clubs.  For those who haven’t heard of Chance to Shine, have a look here: http://www.chancetoshine.org/about/campaign

The project was delivered by gingercoaching on behalf of Seaton Cricket Club.

We worked with 6 primary schools with groups across KS2.  Initially sessions were led by our coach, but as weeks went on, the class teachers were given increased responsibility for running games/activities using plans produced by the coach.  In each school, the final session was a skills based competition with children working in groups to set scores on a variety of tasks – hitting a straight drive from a tee between cones for example.  All the scores were recorded and the aim next year is to progress this into a virtual league whereby teams from different schools can see how their scores compared with others.  The culmination of the project was a skills based festival held at the club on a Friday afternoon. 80 children from 4 schools attended and were tasked to split themselves into small groups ensuring there were children from each school in each group.  The festival ran similarly to the in school competitions.  With some stations manned by leaders, in most cases the children took responsibility for reading the instructions, organising themselves, completing the tasks, and keeping scores – highly autonomous.  This ensured the teachers could flit between groups to see all of their pupils and next year the aim will be to deliver staff CPD alongside the festival to ensure greater sustainability in the schools.  Due to the variation in age range it also prevented the situation where a yr 6 pupil might be competing directly against a yr 3 pupil as would have been the case in a kwik-cricket festival.

We saw a good migration to our colts section.  This was particularly helped by the fact that the local primary school (200 yards away) ran their after school cricket on the same night as our U11s meaning the players could finish at school and walk straight down to club training.  We were also able to run soft-ball practices for newer players for the first time thus helping make the change smoother for less able/experienced players.

Awareness of the project was raised

Those schools involved in the project were given a password for a Chance to Shine page of our website which contained a number of skills and practices – with variations and progressions – so that staff may continue to deliver independently.