The Lord’s Taverners, cricket’s official charity, officially launchedtheir 50th Anniversary Coaching Scheme in London today

Wisden CricInfo staff12-Aug-2003The Lord’s Taverners, cricket’s official charity, officially launchedtheir 50th Anniversary Coaching Scheme in London today.The project is designed to support and improve the quality and deliveryof coaching throughout the game, particularly at grass-roots level, andinvolves sending qualified coaches on overseas scholarships, under theauspices of the England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB), to study coachingmethods and delivery. Lessons learnt overseas are then fed back into thecoaching system in this country, to the benefit of youth cricket and thegame as a whole.Funding for the scheme comes from a special grant of £240,000 earmarkedfrom the Taverners’ successful 50th-anniversary fundraising efforts in2000. Some £50,000 of this has already been spent, on sending four coachscholars to Australia and New Zealand last winter.Over the next three years further scholars will visit India, Sri Lankaand South Africa to study their coaching methods. Another will visit theUSA to study coaching in baseball. And a parallel review of the impactof this programme on coaching practice in this country will be conductedin conjunction with the ECB.Tim Lamb, the ECB’s chief executive, said: “This is a fantasticinitiative by the Lord’s Taverners. The scholarship programme and thelessons learnt from it should have a major impact on our coachingpractice at the grass roots of the game and more widely. The bestcoaching at grass-roots level is an essential prerequisite to asuccessful England team.”And Richard Stilgoe, the president of the Lord’s Taverners, added: “Ourefforts to encourage young people to play in teams rather than in gangswill be complemented by this innovative programme. Coaching needs to befun as well as well structured, and I am sure that thousands of kids inyears to come will be the better for this initiative.”The Lord’s Taverners is a celebrity sporting club and charity, whosestated objective is to “give young people, particularly those withspecial needs, a sporting chance” by providing incentives to playcricket in schools and clubs, enabling young people with special needsto participate in sporting activities, supplying minibuses to specialneeds organisations, and creating recreational facilities in conjunctionwith the National Playing Fields’ Association.