Jo Ramsdale: Coaching women and girls in clubs and schools

Jo Ramsdale is our Yorkshire Tea Community Cricket Award winner for July and we caught up to talk about her coaching in clubs and schools.

She wins a trophy and 1,500 Yorkshire Gold teabags to ensure everyone has a brew in her team or at her cricket sessions.

We all find our own path to cricket and for Jo, hers really snowballed after the family’s move to Yorkshire and her son’s interest in the game.

Duncombe Park CC began girls softball sessions and with three daughters, all four started playing at the Helmsley-based club.

At the suggestion of Bev Nicholson, their women and girls’ Coordinator, Jo took a coaching course with a view to helping her run the girls’ section: “I just really enjoyed learning more about the game. It all went from there really. That seemed to open doors that I wasn’t expecting to open!”

Cricket coaching in schools came next, courtesy of the North East Yorkshire World Cup Legacy (WCL) 2019; a charity focused on providing cricket opportunities for deprived children in the Scarborough area.

They run inclusive after-school and weekend sessions, offer meals in high-deprivation schools, and provide bursaries to remove financial barriers.

Jo became one of their qualified coaches who facilitates that passion for cricket, while also connecting young players to local clubs where suitable. At the request of John Green, the charity’s Chair, Jo began doing free coaching sessions in primary schools in the West Ryedale area.

“I did this with George Bentley, we’d go in and deliver these sessions and I learnt so much from him and then I’d go in alone and run afternoons with different age groups just trying to get them to hit balls and catch balls. They were very young but absolutely loved the sessions and I realised how rewarding it was.”

Further opportunities came about with Jo running girls-only winter training at Ryedale School, again completely free thanks to funding from the World Cup Legacy charity, and aimed at state schools.

By the second year, girls from the age of six to 18 were being given the chance to play cricket indoors and with lots of demand, the next phase was to link them up with a local cricket club, Nawton Grange, to continue the adventure outdoors too.

The sessions at Nawton Grange CC are popular: “I think we have 30 girls now that come every week from the age of five to 13. I go away on a bit of a high as it’s so rewarding. These girls are so talented.”

Thoughts are already turning to 2026 and how to ensure more girls have access to matches against other teams and clubs.

Meanwhile, they have been coaching sessions open to females, from 12 up, that have seen older age brackets getting involved too: “We’ve got women in their sixties turning up to play cricket. Some 30-40 women each month, it was just so nice to be involved in.”

As with all our of winners of the Yorkshire Tea Community Cricket Awards, these is a bubbling energy that is self-evident during our interviews and a keenness to name-check others who have supported along the way too.

“I couldn’t do half of what I do without the support of people like Yorkshire coach George Bentley, Jodie Robson, Bev Nicholson who I play at Duncombe Park with and of course, John Green.”

It’s not just coaching either. Thanks to a generous donation from Zwingo, school children in Scarborough have received free cricket clothing including trousers, hoodies and t-shirts and Jo has been part of the WCL team distributing that kit.

For some kids, the gift of a single item of clothing is significant. Jo tells me: “This is real life. This is children with no shoes on their feet. We are all just in our little bubbles sometimes…but this is happening just down the road. It’s part of why I’m doing this to help. That’s what the World Cup Legacy is all about.”

For Jo, Autumn brings with it more cricket coaching, this time alongside another coach Graham Kettle, running indoor sessions at Lady Lumleys School in Pickering from September.

🫖 Congratulations to Jo and thanks to Yorkshire Tea for their support in backing these awards, as we seek to champion volunteers during the season in a new way and tell their stories.

if you’d like to nominate a volunteer who makes an impact in Yorkshire cricket then you’d be very welcome. The awards run until end of September 2025.

Here are interviews with previous monthly winners.