Since April 2005, Sussex Cricket Board have had the resources of five part time Community Cricket Coaches who have been employed on 18 hour per week contracts.
The coaches have been a fantastic success over this three year period, coaching around 40,000 young people between them in schools, clubs and various other community settings.

The posts came about through a Sport England Community Coach scheme which aimed to make coaching a more recognised profession by providing match funding to organisations
for the employment of Com-munity Coaches.
Prior to this, opportunities for contracted employment as a coach were very limited and there is no doubt that the scheme has had a very positive impact on the coaching profession.
The employment of the coaches has helped to provide a professional service and the coaches are supported by a Continued Professional Development programme.

This funding programme was initially for thee years and though the scheme has been a massive success there is still no certainty about the future of the scheme and the funding from Sport England.
In Sussex this meant that the posts, whose contracts and funding were due to expire in April 2008, were in jeopardy.

However, we have been extremely fortunate in that we were successful in an application to the Spen Cama Cricket Foundation for a grant of £100,000 over three years, on the basis that we were able to get it matched by the National Sports Foundation.
This is a funding body that looks to provide match funding for organisations that have grants,donations or sponsors providing over £50,000.
Our application to the National Sports Foundation was also successful and therefore along with £100,000 provided by ourselves we have not only been able to extend the roles until October 2010, we have also been able to extend the contracts to cover 30 hours per week

This is a huge move forward for cricket in the county as it provides a fantastic additional resource for us to use for the benefit of children across Sussex.
This also provides a great opportunity for clubs to benefit more from the posts.
With an extra 60 hours per week available from the coaches, we want to use this to support more clubs across the county.
Please get in touch if you would like to benefit from this additional resource. andy.hobbs@sussexcricket.co.uk

The team of community coaches, from April 2008, will be:

Simon Funnell – East Sussex,
Dominic Clapp – South Sussex,
Raj Chaudhuri and Matt Parsons – North Sussex (Job Share),
Charlotte Burton – Women and Girls,
Alan Smith – West Sussex.

We also have one other new member of the Cricket Development Team. Tim Shutt joined us in January 2008 as Cricket De-velopment Officer to cover North and West Sussex. This is an additional post which has resulted from a restructure of the Board‘s resources, following the change in Andy Hobbs‘ role (now Head of Recrea-tional Cricket) to take on some of the work previously undertaken by Mike Beckwith and the ever growing activities of the Board.