Lord's Taverners launch coaching initiative

The Lord's Taverners, cricket's official charity, officially launched their 50th Anniversary Coaching Scheme in London today.

The project is designed to support and improve the quality and delivery of coaching throughout the game, particularly at grass-roots level, and involves sending qualified coaches on overseas scholarships, under the auspices of the England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB), to study coaching methods and delivery. Lessons learnt overseas are then fed back into the coaching system in this country, to the benefit of youth cricket and the game as a whole.

Funding for the scheme comes from a special grant of £240,000 earmarked from the Taverners' successful 50th-anniversary fundraising efforts in 2000. Some £50,000 of this has already been spent, on sending four coach scholars to Australia and New Zealand last winter.

Over the next three years further scholars will visit India, Sri Lanka and South Africa to study their coaching methods. Another will visit the USA to study coaching in baseball. And a parallel review of the impact of this programme on coaching practice in this country will be conducted in conjunction with the ECB.

Tim Lamb, the ECB's chief executive, said: "This is a fantastic initiative by the Lord's Taverners. The scholarship programme and the lessons learnt from it should have a major impact on our coaching practice at the grass roots of the game and more widely. The best coaching at grass-roots level is an essential prerequisite to a successful England team."

And Richard Stilgoe, the president of the Lord's Taverners, added: "Our efforts to encourage young people to play in teams rather than in gangs will be complemented by this innovative programme. Coaching needs to be fun as well as well structured, and I am sure that thousands of kids in years to come will be the better for this initiative."

The Lord's Taverners is a celebrity sporting club and charity, whose stated objective is to "give young people, particularly those with special needs, a sporting chance" by providing incentives to play cricket in schools and clubs, enabling young people with special needs to participate in sporting activities, supplying minibuses to specialneeds organisations, and creating recreational facilities in conjunction with the National Playing Fields' Association.