How to Run a Cricket Club

1. Get the basics right before the season starts

Cricket is a long game in every sense — a single match can eat a whole Saturday, and a season runs from April to September. That length builds real loyalty over a summer, but it also means a slow start is hard to recover from. Settle the ground, the kit and the format over winter and you spend the season playing, not scrambling.

Ground and facilities

The square is the thing that makes a cricket club a cricket club, and it's also the thing you almost never own when you're starting out. Most recreational clubs hire from a council recreation ground or a school, or share an established club's outfield on their spare day. A full match needs a prepared 22-yard pitch (the strip in the centre), a roped or marked boundary, sightscreens if you can get them, and — non-negotiable in the recreational game — a tea or clubhouse area, because tea is half the point. Lock a recurring slot for the whole season first: "home on the second and fourth Saturday" beats a fixture list nobody can rely on. If you can, negotiate winter net access too — pre-season nets in March are where you find out who's actually turning up in May, and they're the cheapest retention tool you have.

Equipment

You need: a club kit bag with a couple of pairs of pads, gloves, helmets and a few bats in different sizes so a newcomer or junior can play without buying anything; match balls (a decent hard ball costs real money, so budget for several a season — they get lost in nettles); stumps and bails for both ends; a scorebook or scoring tablet; and a first aid kit. Loan kit matters more than almost anything else for growth — the single biggest barrier to trying cricket is the assumption you need £300 of gear before you can stand at the crease. You don't; you need to borrow a spare lid and a bat that isn't too heavy.

Format

Decide what kind of cricket you run. Casual / social cricket — friendlies, midweek T20, the odd tour — is turn-up-and-play and very welcoming. Structured cricket means league fixtures with a fixed format (40 or 50 overs, or a T20 evening league), selection each week and points on the line. Most clubs run both: a Saturday league side for the committed, and friendlier midweek or Sunday cricket as the front door for newcomers and rusty returners. Don't force a nervous beginner into a tense relegation six-pointer; give them a Sunday friendly first.

2. Build a squad that turns up

Cricket's particular problem isn't finding interested people — it's that you need eleven of them available on the same Saturday, every week, for five months. A club with thirty names on the books and twelve who answer the availability message is a club that concedes matches. Recruitment and availability are the same job.

Where to recruit

• Local Facebook groups — town and village pages convert well, especially in spring. A photo of the ground, "league cricket Saturdays plus relaxed Sunday friendlies, all standards, kit provided, first game free" and you'll get replies within the day.
• The ECB's Play-Cricket and Find a Club tools — affiliating to the England and Wales Cricket Board gets your club listed on the official finder, which catches the steady trickle of people searching for a club after they move to the area.
• Returning and lapsed players — the biggest pool in cricket is people who played at school or university and stopped. They don't need teaching; they need a low-pressure Sunday and a reminder that midweek T20 exists. Target them directly.
• Local schools and colleges — a link to a feeder school or college keeps juniors flowing up into your senior sides, which is the only sustainable way to stay alive over a decade.
• Word of mouth — by mid-season this should be your biggest source. Players bring a mate to make up the numbers, and the mate stays.

Make joining painless

The fastest way to lose a keen returner is to make them email the fixtures secretary and wait three days. The fastest way to convert them is a single link or QR code that adds them to the squad, shows the next fixture and lets them flag their availability. In ClubLono every club gets a join QR code and a public page (something like clublono.com/c/your-club): players scan it, enter their name, and they're on the roster — no email chain, no spreadsheet for the secretary to retype.

3. Decide how you'll collect subs and match fees

Cricket has the most awkward money model of any club sport: a big annual sub that pays for league affiliation, balls and ground hire, plus a match fee on the day for teas and the umpire. There are three models worth considering, and most clubs combine them.

Match fees (pay-per-game)

Players pay a fee each time they play — typically £5–£12 a match depending on whether it covers teas and umpires. Pros: fair on irregular players and one-off ringers, and tied to the cost of putting a game on. Cons: jagged cash flow, and chasing match fees out of a slip fielder who "forgot their card" after a six-hour day is the most thankless job in cricket.

Annual membership

A season sub paid up front, often tiered — full playing, junior, student, social. Pros: it lands the bulk of your income in March before costs hit, smooths the year and locks players in. Cons: it's a big single ask, so it suits committed regulars but puts off the "I'll just play a few games" returner who'd happily pay per match.

Hybrid (recommended for most clubs)

A discounted annual membership for regulars that covers or reduces match fees, plus a pay-per-match rate for occasional players and guests. Best of both worlds — and given how many cricketers drift in and out around work and family, a casual match-fee option is essential for keeping numbers up. The only complication is tracking who's paid their sub, who owes match fees and who's a paying guest, which is where software earns its keep.

What to charge

Work backwards from the real cost of a season: ground hire, league and ECB affiliation, balls, tea, league fines and the inevitable net replacement. Divide by a realistic number of paying members (not your most optimistic one) and set the annual sub to cover those fixed costs; then set match fees to cover the per-game costs — teas and umpires — and round both to numbers people can pay in one tap. Charging £8 a match instead of £7.50 saves you fiddling with change behind the pavilion every Saturday, and nobody has ever left a cricket club over fifty pence.

4. Run a matchday and selection that feel fair

This is where a cricket club either holds its squad together or quietly bleeds players to the club down the road. Cricketers forgive a bumpy outfield and a cold tea. They don't forgive being twelfth man three weeks running with no explanation, or finding out at 9pm on Friday that they're not picked.

Availability and selection

The biggest matchday job is turning a vague pool of "maybes" into a confirmed eleven. Ask all forty members openly and you'll spend Thursday chasing replies; run it as a structured request — every player taps available / unavailable per fixture — and selection becomes picking from a known list. Publish the team as soon as it's settled so nobody's guessing, and rotate fairly so fringe players stay engaged rather than drifting off.

Standings and the points table

Cricket scores in points: a typical league awards a block for a win, fewer for a tie or an abandonment, plus bonus points for batting and bowling within the game — so a side that loses but bats well still banks something. The table is sorted on total points, with promotion and relegation at the ends, and keeping it accurate fixture by fixture is admin nobody enjoys and everybody argues about. ClubLono runs the round-robin format league cricket is built on — every side plays every other, home and away — and keeps the standings current automatically as results come in, so the table on your club page is the one everyone trusts.

Scoring the game

Inside a match, runs and wickets are the currency, but the league result resolves to points. Agree the format before the toss — overs per side, powerplay, bowling limits — because a captain who didn't realise it was 40 overs not 45 is about to cause a row. ClubLono captures the result and rolls it into the season standings, so you're not keeping a separate spreadsheet that disagrees with the league's.

The newcomer brief

Keep a one-minute welcome for beginners and rusty returners: where to field, what the bowling order is, and that nobody minds a duck. Don't recite the laws — leg byes and the LBW law can wait. A friendly captain, a borrowed helmet and a fielding spot in the deep is enough to get someone through their first game and back the next week.

5. Keep players coming back all summer

Retention is cheaper than recruitment, in clubs as in everything else — and a cricket season is long enough that a player who drifts off in June is gone for the year. The work is keeping the casual player feeling part of it.

Communicate in one place

If selection goes out on WhatsApp, the rain-off lands on Facebook and the tour deposit lives in someone's DMs, players will miss things and turn up — or fail to turn up — at the wrong moment. Pick one channel for everything. ClubLono includes a members-only club chat with photos and reactions — every squad member is automatically in it — and a thread per fixture, so a "pitch inspection at 10, decision by 11" message reaches the eleven who are playing, not all forty members.

Publish the fixture list ahead

A cricket fixture list is the spine of the summer. Publish the full season — league fixtures, friendlies, cup dates and the tour — so players can plan holidays and weddings around it, or at least flag the weeks they're away early. ClubLono lets you publish the season with availability built in, and players get a push notification when a fixture or a change goes up, so nobody's working off last year's printout.

Make it social

Cricket clubs that last are the ones where the bar after the game matters as much as the game. The tea, the third-man banter, the awards do, the winter dinner — that's the glue. Run the socials, take photos (with consent) and post them in the chat. Software shouldn't get in the way of the clubhouse; it should just make sure everyone knows when it's open.

6. Stay legal and safe

The dull but necessary section — and in cricket most of it runs through one body, which makes it simpler than it looks.

Insurance and affiliation

Public liability insurance is essential for any club playing on a hired or shared ground, and many grounds require it as a condition of use. The standard route is to affiliate to your county cricket board, which sits under the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB). ECB affiliation typically brings a recognised club insurance scheme covering public liability, players and equipment, plus eligibility for league and cup competition. Read what's actually covered — a hard ball travelling at a fielder, a spectator or a parked car is exactly the claim these policies exist for, so don't treat the basic cover as the ceiling.

Safeguarding

Cricket has a strong junior game, so if you run any youth cricket you need a club welfare officer, DBS-checked coaches and a written policy. The ECB runs the Safe Hands safeguarding framework with ready-made templates and required training — use them rather than writing your own, because junior cricket and the standards expected of it are taken seriously.

Data protection (UK GDPR)

The moment you store members' names, emails or phone numbers — and especially juniors' and parents' details — you're a data controller. In practice: keep a short, plain-English privacy notice, don't share personal data without consent, and let members delete their account on request. With ClubLono the data-protection plumbing is handled at the platform level and members can delete their own account from in-app settings.

Money handling

Cricket clubs move real money — annual subs, bar takings, tour kitties — so a separate club bank account is basic governance, not optional. Don't run subs through the treasurer's current account. If the club grows large enough, look at constituting formally (many become a Community Amateur Sports Club, or CASC, for the tax reliefs); your county board can point you at the paperwork.

7. Grow without burning out the committee

Cricket clubs rarely fold for lack of players — they fold because the same three people have done the fixtures, the subs, the teas rota and the ground prep for fifteen years and finally run out of road. The committee's real job is to stop being the bottleneck.

• Spread the load. Don't let one person hold selection, fixtures and money. Train two or three deputy captains and a second person who can take availability and publish a team, so the season doesn't stall the week the fixtures secretary is on holiday.
• Automate the boring stuff. Match-fee chasing, availability requests, fixture reminders, refunds when rain wins — all of it can be a tool's job. If it lives only in one volunteer's head and inbox, it falls over the moment they step back.
• Write things down. A one-page "how this club runs" doc — ground contact and key codes, league and ECB logins, the bar licence, where the covers and the heavy roller live — protects the club if a long-standing committee member is suddenly unavailable.

8. The tools that actually save time

You can run a cricket club on a paper scorebook, a WhatsApp group, a fixtures spreadsheet and a biscuit tin of match-fee cash. Generations have. It works for a single friendly side, creaks the moment you're running a Saturday league XI plus Sunday and midweek cricket, and becomes a part-time unpaid job for whoever holds the spreadsheet.

Dedicated club software collapses several tools into one and stops any single volunteer being the bottleneck:

• The squad stops being a spreadsheet and becomes self-serve via a QR code.
• Subs and match fees stop being chased and start being collected automatically via Stripe, straight to your club bank account.
• Availability and selection stop being forty WhatsApp replies and become a tap-to-confirm list the captain picks from.
• Messages live in one members-only chat with a thread per fixture, not scattered across WhatsApp and Facebook.
• Fixtures become a published season calendar with availability and automatic refunds when a match is rained off.

ClubLono is free for a single club, with no time limit and no feature cliff — squad, availability, fixtures, chat, subs and refunds all work on the free tier. On paid sessions the host receives the payment less Stripe's 1.5% + 20p and a 5% ClubLono platform fee. The Premium tier (£19.99/month or £199.99/year, with a 14-day free trial on either) drops that platform fee to 1% and unlocks multi-club hosting, leagues, kiosk mode for a pavilion tablet, cross-club stats and DUPR export. ClubLono never holds members' funds — money goes straight to the host's bank account via Stripe, and cancelled paid sessions auto-refund every booked player. There is no per-player fee. It's built for exactly the club this guide describes: a long-summer cricket club that would rather be at the crease than buried in subs admin.