The end of the road for Bradford Park Avenue Ladies

Bradford Park Avenue Ladies (BPAL) is coming to an end as a cricket club in a familiar tale of volunteer shortages.

I reached out to BPAL’s Chair Kirsty Gavillet (below) about the reasons why. It speaks to changing circumstances, some realities in women’s cricket and the balancing act that exists.

Even in a city where demand for the game is insatiable, a club at the forefront of women’s cricket in West Yorkshire is in the process of wrapping up.

The bite-sized version is that Kirsty has been doing most of the admin required to run any cricket club on her own – and that considerable burden is finally enough.

“I’ve been doing the Chair’s role for quite some time. I’ve also been captain of the team. I’ve picked up another couple of committee roles when people have left and they haven’t been replaced.”

Crucially, she added: “And no-one really stepped up. The support never came.”

It’s really important to stress from the start that Kirsty, while clearly sounding deflated, doesn’t want to point fingers – or even thinks there is a culprit. It’s just life:

“It’s nobody’s fault… it isn’t.”

However, the situation has been building over the past 18 months. Requests for help didn’t lead anywhere. Which is to say commitment to full committee roles as there have been ad-hoc elements of support from time to time.

You only really know how much there is to do at a cricket club, if you’ve been there and got the t-shirt.

Without a Secretary or Vice-Chair, Gavillet has been doing the admin, umpire payments, ground liaison and insurance herself – as well as coaching and leading on the field.

I am long enough in the tooth after 15 years of Cricket Yorkshire to understand that this has happened in all forms of recreational cricket, in Yorkshire and everywhere else.

Whether clubs, leagues or other organisations, volunteering comes with pressures and you can only do so much until it becomes too much.

How did it come to this for BPAL?

I’ve watched Bradford Park Avenue Ladies Cricket Club evolve over seven years from an informal training session to a first eleven who won the West Yorkshire Women & Girls Cricket League back-to-back, including going undefeated.

But this isn’t about player potential or performance on the pitch. Instead, it’s volunteering, what’s actually required to run a cricket club, allied with some of the commitments faced by women.

Quietly, BPAL has gone from blooming to fading. The reasons for their playing numbers dwindling also highlights why sourcing volunteers has also been difficult. As Kirsty noted herself:

“It wasn’t so bad last year, but obviously with a number of the young ones, they’re getting older. You know, other things become priorities. Women move away, get jobs, have babies and so on. It did become increasingly difficult to replace them.”

Before anyone flashes to anger at seeing a club come crashing down, no-one has to volunteer. I have been the person on club committees and also the player who just wants to turn his arm over.

As we talk, a weight hangs in the air.

It’s that of someone who has given everything to a cricket club but despite all of that commitment is having to close the proverbial doors.

Gavillet works full-time and has a young daughter. It’s not as if she doesn’t have other commitments to juggle. The drip-drip of waning enthusiasm is just really sad:

“It’s so hard and it just sucks the love of the game out of it for you. Sometimes I just want to tip up and play, you know.”

She added: “I spent seven years trying to build a foundation. So when I did decide to leave, somebody would, you know, take over the reins and it just hasn’t come to fruition.”

The next chapter?

It speaks to Gavillet that her main concern is ensuring all of the players will have clubs for 2027. She plans to take a year out of the game, if not to sit and marvel at how relatively quiet her email and Whatsapp have become.

It will take a few months to close Bradford Park Avenue Ladies as an entity. Even in death, a cricket club requires some final admin.

We conclude with BPAL’s legacy and the way it has given opportunities and helped to shape a group on and off the field.

Kirsty said: “Those girls, they’ll go on and they’ll play… and a little bit of our club will go with them. I think that’s really a good thing.”

A new ‘BPAL Spirit of Cricket Award’ is being earmarked for annual presentation with the West Yorkshire Women & Girls Cricket League.