Schools cricket: Award-winning Owen on inspiring kids

Named Schools Coach of the Year at the 2024 Chance to Shine Awards, Owen Batchelor has an intriguing background you likely won’t know.

We catch up on Zoom; a rare moment of quiet for a teacher who has taken his love of cricket and channelled it into inspiring kids across Scarborough & Ryedale.

Owen is croaky of voice, recovering from illness; an occupational hazard not entirely improved by a half-hour chat but ever-professional, the cricket coach employed by the Yorkshire Cricket Board allows his story to tumble out.

🫖 Enjoy the interview below which is Partner Content for Yorkshire Tea who are proud partners of Chance to Shine.

Impact at Marske

From a cricketing family, Owen has been immersed in the game and played his whole life. A junior with Marske Cricket Club on the North Yorkshire coast, his move into coaching happened at a time of crisis:

“The junior cricket system was dying, there weren’t any junior cricketers feeding into the adult system. The adult teams were slipping down the leagues because we weren’t producing any cricketers. It looked like the junior section was going to go kaput!”

Studying sports at college and already sure of his ambition to do cricket coaching, teenager Owen jumped in feet-first.

“I had no coaching degrees because I wasn’t of age to be able to do it. I couldn’t drive. I would plan all the games, run all the training and would depend on my parents to take me. Or parents of players to take me on game-days. I enjoyed it immediately working with young people.”

Though he wouldn’t know it at the time, this fledgling cricket coach was following in the footsteps of many other volunteers in club cricket, thrown in at the deep end due to a willingness to step up.

Owen clearly had a happy knack for inspiring kids to enjoy the game and improve. Cricket-mad and relatable as a young coach, the results were transformative.

In his early twenties, Owen left Marske to further his coaching opportunities in Yorkshire – but by then, the club had All Stars, Dynamos, plus age groups ranging from under-11s to under-19s.

Naturally, there were others helping to build this hub of junior cricket at Windy Lane and among influences on Owen’s own path, he names Jonathan Pickard as a coach who was supportive.

Marske paid for Owen’s Level 2 coaching badge which he passed shortly after his eighteenth birthday. His coaching drills and activities were adapted from his own game as well as absorbing as much as he could from others.

“Turning up to (coach) games and training, they were very basic to start with so simple things like hitting out, catching and throwing the ball back to warm up before games. As time went on, I understood more and felt more confident with the kids.”

New YCB chapter

After a sports coaching degree at uni, Owen applied and got a job with the Yorkshire Cricket Board (YCB) as a Community Cricket Officer for the Scarborough & Ryedale district.

Chance to Shine is the national charity who, in association with partners across counties, ‘deliver coaching, competition and leadership development in state primary and secondary schools.’

On the ground in North Yorkshire and elsewhere, that means Owen and colleagues visiting schools to run cricket sessions, as well as involving teachers who can carry on with the delivery afterwards.

The YCB shared their Chance to Shine targets and plans for 2025 with me to give some context at a county level. The goal is reach 110 primary schools offering the CTS Whole School Programme (a free half-term of cricket) which equates to just shy of 10,000 participants.

In addition, another 600+ schools are set to take part in the YCB’s Dynamos Schools Festivals and Skills Festivals while 90 more schools are earmarked for Cricket Engagement Days.

As for Owen, he shadowed other Chance to Shine coaches and swotted up on the online portal with resources but once again (a bit of an emerging theme), it was straight in:

“Nothing can prepare you for going into a school. It was the same back when I was 16. Nothing can prepare you for that first day when you go into North Yorkshire, it’s freezing, blowing a gale, you’ve got thirty, screaming Year 2s, five tennis balls and a bat!”

His geographic reach, if I can put it like that, is huge. While a focus has been Scarborough schools, Owen has done Chance to Shine sessions as far inland as York and Harrogate, as well as Richmond and Middlesbrough further North.

Schools strategy

What about how it’s decided who receives a Chance to Shine coach at their school?

Owen tells me: ‘We don’t just pick a school and go in. It’s strategically identified. We want kids to play cricket, we want them out on a pitch so we choose schools often that are close to a pitch and have good links.”

There is thought given to the cost as well as the amplified impact of a Chance to Shine session or programme. The schools selected are often determined based on the proportion of pupils receiving free school meals.

Linking schools with clubs is part of the roadmap too so kids can continue their journey.

As for working with which cricket clubs, Owen tells me that the YCB are impartial and once a school is identified, there will be outreach to see who is based locally that might like to be involved.

Speaking of impact, I ask a leg-side half-volley question that has Owen squirming a bit. What is the feedback on his coaching? He’s won a national award so there must be a growing fan club?

“I’ve been given a lot for Christmas! It’s not just the sentimental things but when there’s kids that come up to you and say thank-you, that was amazing – and they’ll be asking more about cricket.”

Thanks to Owen for sharing his journey so far from teen coach at Marske to Chance to Shine award-winner.

Yorkshire Tea & Chance to Shine

This article is kindly sponsored by Yorkshire Tea who are proud partners of Chance to Shine. They supported the Chance to Shine Street Yorkshire Finals last year and have worked with the national charity for over a decade.

It is part of an involvement with grassroots cricket that stretches back 30 years from the design of their packaging to the tea supplied to clubs and our very own Cricket Tea of the Year competition.

A game that stops for tea, what could be better?

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