13 June 2024
With students playing hard ball cricket competitively and the school’s first ever regional cricket tour last weekend, Woldingham cricket is very much on the front foot, as Head of Cricket Mr Darryl Rebbetts explains.
Mr Darryl Rebbetts, Head of Cricket
Since joining in September 2023, Woldingham and I have shared the vision of driving forward cricket for our students. Female cricket is booming, with participation rates going through the roof, English central contracts making cricket a full-time career for women, and big contracts for tournaments around the world. In addition to an exciting future as players, for girls with a passion for cricket career opportunities are growing in coaching, officiating, and as a pundit.
Cricket has always been a game of spirit and integrity, with a respect for diversity. Fostering those through playing cricket in our beautiful valley is something that really spoke to me when I joined as Head of Cricket. To fast track Woldingham’s cricket programme, we have invested in our facilities to cater for not only cricketing excellence but also participation. Our recently refurbished sports hall now hosts four indoor cricket nets, astroturf roll out pitches and excellent lighting. Outdoors we have two all-weather astroturf pitches with roll out cages for practice and matches outside throughout the summer.
This year, we began our journey into hard ball cricket, diving straight in with U17, U15 and U13 teams to push ourselves against other local schools. We still play softball cricket across all year groups to help students get into cricket, as not only is cricket a fun game to play, it embodies other values.
As we progress our cricketing journey at Woldingham, we took students in Years 9 and 10 to Cheltenham on the school’s first-ever regional cricket tour last weekend (see report below), which we intend to run annually. We are also planning a cricket tour (jointly with swimming) to Dubai and Abu Dhabi in October 2025, where students will compete internationally with some exceptional facilities - and the very special experience of playing cricket under floodlights.
This is an immensely exciting time for cricket at Woldingham. In the longer term, we aim to have hard ball teams in every year group, alongside our overriding goal to give all students the opportunity to get involved in cricket, whether it be with the ambition of representing the school, county, or even country, or just for sheer enjoyment.
Winter programme – autumn and spring terms
Thursdays 7.15-8.15am Sports Hall
Summer term programme
Tuesday/Wednesday 5.00-6.00pm Top Pitches
Games lessons: Top Pitches (1 hour)
All year round
Weekly indoor nets. Sports Hall
Inaugural regional cricket tour a big success
Our U15 cricket hard ball cricket tour to Cheltenham over the weekend of 7-9 June was an amazing adventure for our cricketers. They played all three matches on grass wickets, a new experience for many, and showed great courage and progress throughout the weekend as their batting, bowling and fielding were tested against two experienced club sides in Apperley and Cheltenham CC, as well as a team from Cheltenham Ladies College (pictured above with our U15 team). Thank you to all three clubs, who hosted us wonderfully over the weekend.
We presented three tour awards: Alexa B, Year 9, won best batter, Vaishvi P, Year 10, best bowler, and Leonora S, Year 10, won our ‘Top Tourist’ award for her leadership and all round display, both on and off the pitch.
When not playing, the students were able to let their hair down a little with two lovely meals out at TGI Fridays and Zizzi and an excellent game of bowling to top off the weekend. A huge well done from me and Mrs Treacy, who joined us on the tour. We were impressed with every single one of our cricketers, who represented the school brilliantly.
