Under 9s (and Under 8s) Club Cricket in 2025!
After a very successful two years of Under 9s Cricket, Wiltshire Cricket is delighted to start the planning for Under 9s Cricket in 2025!
What happened in 2024?
In 2024, we saw fantastic levels of Under 9s activity:
- 21 clubs participated in Under 9s fixtures
- 16 Under 9s festivals took place across Wiltshire
- A league table collating total fixtures played across all festivals was collated, with the leading clubs playing the following number of fixtures; Cricklade (29), Chippenham (28), Swindon (28)
This represented continued growth and profile of Under 9s Cricket and we are looking forward to building on this again in 2025.
The management and administration of Under 9s Cricket
In 2025, Wiltshire Cricket will again coordinate Under 9s activity throughout Wiltshire. As part of this role, we will do the following:
- Produce a number of resources to support clubs in running Under 9s festivals
- Collect responses to enable us to create a list lead contacts for Under 9s Cricket at each club
- Collate dates of festivals that clubs will host in 2025
- During the season, we will collate results / participation from all Under 9s festivals and uploaded this to our play-cricket website at; http://wiltsclubcomps.play-cricket.com
- As we have done in 2023 and 2024, we will recognise and reward the three clubs who (to our awareness) played the most Under 9s matches in the 2025 season at our Grassroots Cricket Awards evening
Under 9s Activity in 2025 – Please confirm your club’s involvement!
If you are a club reading this, we now want to hear from you so that we can start capturing planned Under 9s activity for the 2025 season.
As mentioned above, Wiltshire Cricket is again looking to play a leading role in coordinating lead contacts for Under 9s Cricket and also producing a list of festivals for clubs to enter. Our hope is that we can see even more festivals scheduled in 2025 because, despite an increase from 2023, all of the evidence in 2024 pointed to there being more demand for Under 9s Cricket than there was supply of festivals. With this in mind, we also hope that by making contact at this early stage we may be able to schedule even more festivals in 2025.
Next Steps:
To help us gauge Under 9s Cricket activity for 2025, it would be much appreciated if your club could complete the an Under 9s Information form that has been emailed to all clubs by the deadline of Friday 7th February 2025. Based on the information we collect through this form we will then contact all confirmed Under 9s clubs and lead contacts by mid February with details of the lead contacts for Under 9s Cricket and a recommendation around dates of Under 9s festivals.
Would clubs be interested in Under 8s Cricket?
As part of the information form that has been sent to clubs, we have asked a question about Under 8s Cricket. One of our observations from 2025 was that the festivals can see quite a mixture of ability levels and experience levels between players. Whilst these scenarios are generally well managed by the clubs involved, it is inevitably the case that at such a young age the differences in age between an Under 8 and an Under 9 can exacerbate the differences in playing ability and experience. With many clubs fielding players from across both Under 8s and Under 9s we are keen to explore whether there might be interest in scheduling a handful of Under 8 only festivals in addition (not in place of) to the programme of Under 9 festivals. These Under 8 festivals may take a slightly different format which we can discuss if the interest in there in hosting and participating in a small number of Under 8 festivals.
For clubs who want to discuss Under 9s Cricket, or need a copy of the Information form, please contact Pete Sykes:
