UPPING THE ANTE

Travel east along High Road in Chipstead, Surrey, and you will come across an impressivelooking cricket club pavilion within the grounds of Chipstead, Coulsdon & Walcountians Cricket Club. It certainly attracted Club Mirror’s attention. MATTHEW MOGGRIDGE reports

This month, the Chipstead, Coulsdon & Walcountians Cricket Club opened its brand spanking new pavilion. The 150-year-old club has plenty happening at the moment, and while the project is behind schedule - thanks to snow earlier in the year - professional cricketers Alec Stewart and David Ward officially opened the new facility on Bastille Day, 14 July 2010.

The club is an amalgamation or merging of three different clubs: the Chipstead Cricket Club, the East Coulsdon Cricket Club and the Old Walcountians. The former two clubs merged in 1974 with the latter joining in the mid-90s.

Graham Plater is the club’s sales and marketing director and Ian Childs is chairman. According to Plater, the current club management is running the place like a business, but before that it tended to drift along.

Childs, the new chairman, has been with the club for around 15 months – although he has been a club player for many years; a new board has been formed and the transition from the old to the new order has been amicable. Plater said that the old chairman wanted to move on and that there was no hostility.

The club has around 100 senior members. There are both adult and student playing members and a thriving Colts section ranging from under-8s to under-16s. Beyond that, there are the senior teams, although some Colts play senior cricket too, according to Plater - particularly on Sundays.

“We’re a Surrey Focus club and we’re involved in the Chance to Shine scheme,” said Plater. The scheme is a national coaching programme for children driven by Surrey County Cricket Club. Focus Clubs are affiliated to Surrey, said Plater. “Our coaches go out to local schools for boys and girls,” he added, explaining how the scheme is just entering its second year.

According to Plater, the building of the new pavilion was all to do with community involvement. The old pavilion, he said, was old and run-down, but the new one has been built to ECB standards.

The former pavilion had character but also a bowed roof and had been slightly extended back in the seventies. “It was just a traditional old clubhouse with power shower facilities and a bar. The members do everything: the wives make the tea and the players provide the sandwiches and its very family oriented,” said Plater.

Chipstead is true grassroots cricket, according to Plater, because there are young kids coming up through the ranks. “Where adult cricket is concerned, we have four sides on a Saturday and two or three on Sunday. We’re in the fifth division of the Surrey Championships but we’re coming up,” said Plater. He said that the club had finished third over the last three years and that the top two get promoted.

Things are about to change. The new clubhouse is now open and the team has a new captain in Nick Woods, an Oxbridge semi-pro. “And he’s recruited a couple of other guys, plus there are people coming up through our youth policy,” Plater added. “We like to develop our own, that’s the whole point of the Colts,” he said.

The new clubhouse was built with the aid of a grant from the ECB, but the vision for it came from the new order being led by chairman Ian Childs. “The new board did a vision statement and a business plan on how to take the club forward,” said Plater. “We were in the bottom league of the Surrey Championship and it was crucial we took things forward, raised our local profile and got more kids involved,” he said.

Graham Plater and chairman Ian Childs both have long associations with the club and Plater can remember winning the old Fuller’s League back in 1986. On a committee of six people, five of them went to school together and a lot of the members were involved in the development of the clubhouse, according to Plater.

Ian Childs first played at the club aged 16 back in 1974, the year of the original merger. “I’ve spent many a happy year there,” he told Club Mirror. “My roots are there and while I don’t play regularly, over the last decade I’ve had the occasional game just to keep involved,” he said. “People told me to get back involved, they obviously needed a bit of help in terms of the new pavilion which basically meant knocking the old clubhouse down and starting again.”

After producing a report for the club on how it should move forward, Childs found himself as the chairman. He thought it would be ideal if the club could generate enough finances to rebuild the pavilion in time for the club’s 150th anniversary.

“Last summer there were a lot of discussions with Surrey County Cricket Club and the ECB about partnership funding and by the end of September it was apparent we weren’t ready to undertake such a vast development,” said Childs.

The plan was to wait until 2010, but then Childs received a telephone call from the ECB saying they had a pot of money for which they couldn’t find a home. “Nobody else was in a position to push the button to get the development done during the winter, but we gave it a go and were about a month late in starting,” said Childs.

 

Before going out to tender, part of the funding criteria was to go through a procedure of getting three quotes, sitting down with the architect and the builder and working out the best route to go.

“In theory it was knocked down and rebuilt, but there were a lot of considerations in terms of the planning requirements. It was a standalone site, but there were preservation orders on the surrounding trees. What we could and couldn’t do near a tree was unbelievable,” he said, explaining how it was a challenging project.

 

The old cricket nets were taken away and new ones installed, the square was relaid late last year and some farmland was reclaimed.

The old pavilion was demolished in November 2009 at a time in the club’s calendar when very little happens. This, it is hoped, will change now that the club has a new pavilion. Unlike the old pavilion, the new one is heated and Childs believes it’s a pleasant environment and people will be happy to use the facilities, which include a bar and function room.

“We must increase our revenue streams,” said Childs; that, after all, was the whole point of the new pavilion. “But we don’t want to run before we can walk or lose the club ethos,” he said, explaining how he didn’t want it hired out ‘willy nilly’ or get it trashed by unruly people. For the time being the club will be used for its primary purpose, but by October, plans will be in place on how to proceed.

“We’re in no great hurry,” Childs admitted, “but we’ll be looking at the whole running of it.”

Going back to the club’s ethos, Childs said it was a members’ club. “And long may it continue,” he said, explaining how the club’s new management has changed the club’s structure and made it a more dynamic centre of the organisation.

“So, hopefully, with a bit of grey hair and experience, we’ve come back and established an executive board that will be more active and focused on certain aspects. It’s all about making sure our strategies are well-maintained, it’s just a more focused approach,” he said.

Childs said he was lucky enough to have a job that allows him to devote time to the club and admits that over the last six months the new pavilion has taken over his life. “It’s taken a hell of a lot of time, but it’ll be all worthwhile,” he said.

There are, of course, various niceties, like a plasma screen, that enable the club to finish off the project to a high standard, and for items like these, the club intends to continue with its fundraising efforts. The summer party was on the 10th July and that raised money and then, of course, there was the big day on July 14th when the new pavilion officially opened and the club played a star-studded MCC team for the first time since 1960.

The plans for the immediate future? “I think we’ll take a breather and enjoy it,” Childs concluded.