Boom in female cricket in Buxton is ‘unbelievable’​​​​​​​

Coach Rick Lewis helped develop a women’s team at Buxton CC last year having worked with girls in the club’s junior section and seen the potential given the higher profile the female game now receives at all levels.

And now, with training sessions attracting over 30 adults each week as well as the continual growth of female players in the juniors, Lewis is keen to see that success continue.

He said: “It’s been unbelievable really and it’s just going so well. Everybody is so keen to train and play. They just love it – I’ve never seen anything like it.

"It’s added a totally different dimension to the club as a whole and dragged it into the new millennium really.

"It’s not just on the playing front – the women involved at the club now help out with training, assist in doing up the clubhouse and it all makes us a lot more like a cricket family.

"That family atmosphere has been so important. We’ve been restricted on the social side in the last year of course but we hope that will take off once guidelines change.”

Lewis says that on the playing front, the senior women’s team has largely been involved in festival cricket which sees eight-a-side softball matches played in a tournament structure with 12 teams usually playing in total.

But he hopes to progress to eventually see the team progress to hard ball cricket and even enter a county league.

He said: “We’ve been doing really well in the festivals. At one in Charlesworth recently the ladies even won the tournament which was a great achievement, beating New Mills in the final who have been playing together for a while.

"We’ve been really encouraged by the positive comments received and it’s helping us start to develop all aspects of the players’ games.

"We have more festivals coming up including at Darley Dale on July 4, Hayfield a week later, then others at New Mills and Holmesfield as well as our own on September 12.”

Lewis added that he hopes to not only move into hardball cricket but also to see the club’s players start to earn their coaching badges, so as to become able to coach themselves as the team progresses.

He said: “We’re moving towards using the harder balls, wooden bats and pads, as the ambition is to get into hardball leagues eventually as they do exist in the county if we wanted to enter.

"But the coaching element will be important too because it will help the teams become more self-sufficient in that sense, so three of our players are doing their level one badges through the ECB.

"Hopefully soon they’ll be able to set up their own drills as that will in turn help with their course assessments.

"I'm really keen to keep seeing it all develop as we’ve got girls as young as nine-years-old coming on board now into the juniors and the female cricket side to the club is thriving as a whole.”

Anyone wishing to get involved at Buxton can visit the club’s Facebook page or its website at buxton.play-cricket.com.