A week after the first day of LCA Cricket Coaching’s first ever summer course, I am sat here in the office reflecting on such a good week. One stand out performance for the week was the weather; coming from the Midlands and spending most of my coaching career in the north of the country, generally the winter courses and the summer courses all merge into one, however down in Chichester, no-one could argue; “it’s like training in Perth” was the shout from one of the lads. As a coach, it is always nice not to have to think about different options if the weather decides to fall out with us!!

The Chichester U16 course was the smallest course we have this summer with only 12 lads being on it. This allowed for some real in depth and intense coaching material to be delivered and also for the use of the video camera which doesn’t generally appear on the summer courses apart from the odd parent who likes to catch a glimpse of their next Andrew Flintoff in action. The lads, all from Chichester CC, contributed brilliantly to the course and responded with clear improvements by the end of the week. The course was spread over 5 days due to games taking place at Priory Park each afternoon allowing for the guys to go home (or some take part in the games) and put into practice what they learned during the morning session.

Emphasis was placed on the fielding and catching side of the game for the first couple of days and despite losing a couple of balls down one of the U15′s throats, the standard was generally very high! This left ample time to go into real detail with the other two disciplines of our game…..batting and bowling. As always, the basic & simple start – the forward drive – and variations of this took up a good hour of one of the mornings with Logie (Richard Logan) constantly drilling it into the lads that “to progress on, we must establish a solid technique with a simple shot such as this”. Once happy with the progress made – and it must be pointed out that the concentration levels were sky high – we moved on to a bit of bowling.

There was a complete mix of bowlers on the course and surprising but excellent to see, were two talented leg spinners. This meant the initial bowling session was based on the ‘fundamentals’ of any bowling action which are really important to get right before attempting to move on. The session finished with each of the boys getting filmed bowling from 3 angles.

The early part of the following morning was spent going through the videos with the lads on a big screen attempting to find ways to improve their actions whilst pointing out the good things that were already going on. Only 2 out of the 12 had ever seen themselves bowling before and could not believe that they looked like they did. It is a fantastic way of learning as you can see first hand what is going on and work out the slight alterations you might need to make to improve.

The remainder of the week was spent introducing various different batting shots, from the sweep shot to evasive work, working on the areas of the bowling action that the boys needed to work on and the standard warm-up / fitness / fielding sessions religiously taken by myself.

All the guys that attended gave 100% on the course which is all you can ask as a coach. This made it so easy for us to progress certain techniques and drills quickly and hence see the lads making big strides in their development. Special thanks goes to our helper Eduardo who is over from Italy and wanted to experience some English cricket coaching and also to Priory Park for allowing us to hold the course at such a picturesque venue.

NB: Two of the boys on the course were heavily involved in helping Chichester 2nd XI to a comfortable win on Saturday; good work lads!!

Moving onto Portsmouth this week…..

Browny