Another exciting season is upon us and hopefully the wet weather won't further derail the first round of fixtures tomorrow.
As always I would like to welcome all new members to this fantastic club and wish our new captains and their teams the best of luck for the season. I hope that you are all fit and firing ready to give it your best for the mighty Oak Trees! With my standard optimistic disposition I have every confidence that if we brush up on our fielding a couple of our sides will be challenging for promotion. It is also great to see a fresh set of talented youngsters who under Paul ‘Fuga’ Marks tutelage are now ready to play adult cricket.
During the off season the clubs new dynamic committee has been working hard to deliver some really positive developments to the club which I want to briefly outline. Kicking this off was the club survey which gave us some good insight into what the members wanted going forward, our average demographic plus some witty responses as well! Two things that have since been introduced off the back of the survey is our first cricket tour in a long while to Edinburgh which Will and Ed have keenly organised and structured skills based training sessions for the adult players on a Wednesday night.
For those that know me I place a huge importance on the social element within sport as I feel a strong social scene leads to a strong club and performance on the field. With this in mind Drew has successfully applied for some funding from the ECB for a new patio to be built at the side of the pavilion by the net. This will make a huge difference to our facilities whether it be hosting events, BBQs, evening drinks and welcoming spectators. The total project will cost circa £6000 and the ECB will donate £2800 towards this to be claimed by the start of August which leaves the rest for the club to raise and find. In real terms we still need about £2000 and it would be a real shame to miss out on the funding. All I ask is that the whole club gets behind this initiative and supports Drew; if we collectively can help find the remaining funds via additional club sponsorship opportunities, match sponsorship, attend club social events the quicker and easier it becomes. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with Drew or I if you have any ideas or opportunities.
It gives me great pleasure to announce our new club website https://www.greattothamcc.co. uk/ which James Hay has quietly been building with the help of our new web host, I hope that you like it! Over the coming months you will continue to see further developments and content being added such as photo galleries, team pages, stats and we’re just awaiting Play Cricket to update the Saturday fixtures which will auto-populate into the Match Centre. One thing you will find on the website is a link to our new club shop with Romida where you can buy all the new Adidas kit; there is an early bird discount of an extra 10% from today until next Friday the 11th of May which I recommend you take advantage of.
Finally thank you for everyone’s help thus far; best of luck again for tomorrow, let’s try to be competitive within the spirit of cricket, especially as we have a second fair play award to defend and encourage the club as a whole to be successful!
Cheers
Richard (aka Dicko)
