How AI is being used by cricket clubs

AI (artificial intelligence) is increasingly being adopted in club cricket to assist volunteers with a wide range of tasks. Here, I’ll look at how your own club could think about this technology – to save time and generate income. Included are real-life examples from clubs and leagues in Yorkshire.

🚨 Proceed with caution

Tools such as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini – as well as AI capabilities in so many online products and services – can already do remarkable things. The speed with which accuracy and potential of AI progresses is phenomenal.

However, using AI for tasks and roles within club cricket should be done with caution. It can – and does – frequently get things wrong. Taking the output as fact is going to trip you up one way or another. Always check, edit AI prompts and check again.

I asked Google’s Gemini to tell me what the shortcomings of AI were and this is what came back:

‘AI models are “prediction engines,” not truth engines. They can sound very confident while being completely wrong.’

There is also the need to be wary of not sharing sensitive data with AI from a GDPR perspective. That data is ultimately being handed over to a third party and do you know how it will be used? Equally, be aware of copyright with images you use.

Lastly, before uploading all of your life’s secrets to generate that witty GIF for Instagram, do you want those images saved online by a third party?

Ok, warnings done and dusted… now for the fun stuff….

🚀 3 Reasons to use AI in club cricket

Speed – An AI chatbot like ChatGPT can generate answers in seconds. Quicker than a Mark Wood bouncer. Time-strapped volunteers are able to definitely make life easier for themselves – as I’ll show you.

Research – ChatGPT is increasingly being used as a search engine. information from sources across the web can be assembled in less time than it takes for you to load up your web browser.

Cost – There are paid AI tools to give enhanced features but the free versions will often do enough to support cricket clubs with many jobs. Of course, paid versions may ultimately save enough time, effort, stress or cost in another way to be worth stumping up for.

You’ll notice in the screenshot below – I ran out of my ‘free plan’ so I revert to an older version unless I subscribe.

🤔 Understanding AI prompts

AI is only as good as the prompt a human provides. Assuming a prompt is needed at all. If you’re after a quick image for a Facebook post, that’s one thing. If you’re looking for in-depth thinking over time, it will need training to your club’s circumstances and requirements.

It is well worth a) using AI to get better AI prompts (ironically) and b) Googling for AI prompts as someone somewhere will have done the thinking before you. Using AI can be very frustrating until you get to grips with it. A shortcut isn’t cheating, it’s the fastest route to the outcome you want.

Cricket is something AI struggles with, particularly around image generation. Text prompts, however specific, often result in too many players, stumps in weird players, people facing odd directions and a propensity of making a cricket bat like a hockey stick.

It needs a bit of patience and where relevant, uploading something as a framework to give the AI a head start. Something I like to do is always ask it: What do you need from me to get the best results here? Cue some supplementary questions.

🏏 How does Cricket Yorkshire use AI?

If you’re curious, I would never use AI for my actual writing. This website is entirely original, human-generated content and always will be. However, AI does all kinds of cool stuff from transcription of audio to strategic brainstorming.

4️⃣ ways that AI can help your cricket club

1. Fixtures – Every cricket club could use AI to help with the considerable admin burden. One example is fixtures. Tong Park Esholt CC’s David Young has begun using ChatGPT to produce consolidated fixtures lists across the teams in different leagues.

AI can save these generated documents as various file formats like Google Sheets or PDF for download. I saw TPE’s combined fixtures with a spreadsheet comprising date, home team, away team, fixture type, division/cup, start time and ground.

Combining that information manually from multiple sources neatly would take an age – but it doesn’t stop there. David then got ChatGPT to generate .ics files of the fixtures so players can import them into the calendars on a phone / desktop.

While AI can combine data, it can also tease it apart. So, for the Bradford Premier League, David generated 2026 fixture lists for the dozens of clubs (for their first and second eleven) as a pdf. He also offered clubs their fixtures again as a file format to import into calendars.

In addition, ChatGPT was easily able to produce a weekly fixture list of all the games in any division. (David uploaded fixtures from Play-Cricket and AI did the rest).

Of course, there is still human involvement here but we are talking considerable time-saver, compared to many hours with a spreadsheet until your eyes glaze over.

I can’t help but think that cricket leagues (if they don’t already) can use AI to actually generate their fixtures for a whole season. It’s about providing teams, start dates, any condition or logic that AI needs to bear in mind. Of course, the difficulty is to avoid fixture clashes with other leagues but it’s in the realm of the possible.

Yorkshire now has huge cricket leagues that have swelled in size. The job for fixture secretaries must be onerous. I notice some fixtures have been later this year as the sheer number of moving parts and team preferences need thinking about.

2. Income generation – There are countless ways AI can help those in club cricket to generate income. Indirectly. It’s not a pot of gold at the end of a keyboard stroke – but let’s give you some examples.

Clubs can find fundraising challenging because you feel like you do the same thing all the time. Get AI to give you 50 ideas that your committee can discuss to their heart’s content.

Want to turbocharge your sponsorship efforts? Get an AI-powered chatbot to share the best sponsorship opportunities in your local area. Plus contacts. Ask it for new things at your club to get sponsorship for. You could get support writing a sponsorship proposal.

With all of this – you’ll need to give background and context so the feedback is as useful as it can be. Equally, if you’ve already contacted 100 companies, give AI that list and ask for those to be ignored from the results.

3. Writing – Whether match reports, social media posts or grant applications, AI can cut down the time and effort for volunteers. Upload the match details from Play-Cricket or give ChatGPT a prompt to produce 20 x Facebook posts with some context – voila!

Let’s talk about grant applications. Writing for different purposes in various styles is a skill. Not everyone has it. For grant applications, AI can be a companion but please don’t ask it to generate 1,000 words and copy/paste that into an online submission. It’s a team-mate, not the captain, if I can put it like that.

One Bradford club told me how they will input grant guidance documents and ask it to cross-reference them against their Club Development Plan to highlight relevant or applicable ideas. They also asked it to score the application as an assessor might.

Another use of AI is as a critique. You can choose the level of ferocity on the feedback! It can compare your written application to the funding criteria to seek out gaps, weaker arguments and parts that don’t hit the brief. Anywhere you ramble, repeat yourself or language and grammar should be tightened.

4. Image / videos – This is a rich seam of creative inspiration. Many of us (myself included) are not graphic designers or able to whip up a professional image. It’s just not how I think.

AI like ChatGPT (many other alternatives out there) allows you to describe the image you want. Or, try a style on an existing photo such as gold, crayon, sketch or retro anime. Ready-made prompts such as ‘reimagine my pet as a human’ can be fun to play with. In addition, a host of apps are connected such as Adobe Photoshop to allow you to blur the background or add effects.

For video, it’s not unusual to get free AI credits that soon disappear. Or you must subscribe to actually download the video you created. To be honest, if I want to experiment with video, I want to dabble first to see what the capability is like.

Ok, you might be thinking: What could we actually do for our cricket club? Think social media graphics, posters, events, sponsor shoutouts, publicity for new players, you name it.

👋 All images in this article are created with AI. If you want some impressive prompts, check out this General Purpose blog.

🤩 Authenticity, personality and voice

The more you put into shaping and improving AI, the better the results you’ll likely get. However, I can still spot an AI-produced image or section of text a mile off.

There is no substitute for showing your own team or club personality. Time saved needs to be offset with the risk of sounding just like everyone else using the same tools.

Once you’ve finished reading this – please leave a comment too – then hop over to social media and see what posts you can spot as AI. There’s nothing wrong with it, particularly with a generic club announcement about an event, time and date.

But, be wary of just copying trending styles as they’re obvious. Aim for distinctiveness, whether you use AI or not. 

Clubs are aiming to halt readers’ scrolling and pay attention. Messaging ought to be adapted with the audience front-of-mind (a charity appeal will be different to a shoutout about your comedy night.) If not done carefully, AI obstructs rather than supports.

However, there are a myriad of ways that it is a powerful companion – why not dive in and give it a go?