What is a Successful School Cricket Team?

Almost every school in England requires its boys to play cricket at some stage of their school career.  The game deteriorates in the great majority of schools from mass participation to one of minority appeal.  The only thing that varies is the size of the minority. 

Is this dramatic decline inevitable?  Given the universality of the problem of maintaining willing engagement in the game, it would seem logical that all schools might address the question above every season, and work out their success criteria for the game in the school.  And then an imaginative plan for delivering it. 

There are several national competitions in school cricket, in which the legitimate aim of many participants will be to win.  The number of children involved in these fixtures is a very small proportion of the participants in school cricket.  And with every round that goes by, that number halves.  If successful cricket teams just win matches and competitions, then the majority can't be successful.

Cricket battles with several structural disadvantages.  The game can be unfashionably long, but this is not the greatest problem that it faces.  Cricket is as democratic as North Korea. Opportunities are unequally distributed, and there is a threshold of minimum competence at every level of the game.  There are more and less glamorous roles in other games: not everyone can be centre forward, but specialist full backs are important members of teams at all levels.  Few cricketers find satisfaction in being a specialist number ten who doesn't bowl.  Or devote themselves to mastering the challenge of third man or long stop.

Successful school cricket teams inspire a love of the game.  This is a unique cocktail of features involving teamship, selflessness, triumph and disappointment, a degree of technical and tactical mastery, but above all fun.  Teams who start with this explicit aim find it easier to shape their decisions on how to allocate and distribute opportunities.  What to encourage and how to support the players. The better technicians enjoy performance triumph, but also develop empathy and an understanding of why they don't bat through the innings every week.  Schools whose players love the game don't have to worry unduly about maintaining their player base.

In all research into why children play games, having fun is always number one.  Participation, playing with friends, feeling valued and accepted are part of that fun.  As is the excitement of competition and the opportunity to become better.  The biggest factor in all of those is the attitude of the adults who shape the experience.  Finding success for all participants, whether it is scoring a hundred or ten is the challenge for every school coach:  the aim is to give everyone a sense of achievement and worth. 

Cricket is neither the world's best game, nor its worst. Though there are people in every single school who hold both those views.  Cricket is neutral.  It is how cricket is delivered that determines its impact and the quality of the players' experience.  Some children (of all abilities) begin a lifelong love affair with the game as a result of the experience of their schooldays: others learn - equally efficiently - to despise the game.  Some cricket coaching doesn't make players better, it just makes them bitter.

Negative coaching, fear of making mistakes, feeling inadequate, not being trusted with any opportunity to contribute, not learning anything and not having fun: these are the turn offs of school cricket.  The legacy of these experiences is that players reject the game.  The response of schools might then logically be to focus their creativity on making the game more fun for all players: sadly, a more common reaction is to attempt to levy compulsion to take part.  Stimulating intrinsic motivation is the only sustainable way to build participation. 

Part of the richness of cricket is that people can find fun in different ways.  Fast bowlers,  spin bowlers, attritional batsmen, stroke players - even scorers.  Athleticism is desirable, but not essential. The potential appeal of the game is wide.  But no one loves a game that gives them no sense of enjoyment or worth.  No one relishes an atmosphere of fear, or the miserable post mortems that can accompany defeat.

At some levels of the game, performance has greater significance.  But even elite teams value the roles of all participants, and ensure that there is fun in achievement.  Those that don't find that their players melt away in the senior years, even those who have previously enjoyed playing success.

Great cricket coaches have always developed a love of the game, and managed their teams to achieve that.  Sadly, this is far from always the case.  The leadership of cricket in a school is about quality controlling the experience of all pupils.  That is unlikely to be accomplished unless all the coaches involved are quite clear what a successful school cricket team looks like.