PATHWAYS AND PARTNERSHIPS DEVELOPING EXCELLENCE

Senior Talent Manager). Producing high quality people is crucial to our club, and our existing workforce are hugely committed to their work and developing young cricketers.

Our partnership with Oxfordshire Cricket is again working well and is a critically important extra element to our Performance Pathway. It is firmly embedded into our system and doubles our pool of potential players. We now have two professional players in our ranks thanks to this partnership, with further players in our Academy and many now being developed by us within the Oxfordshire Academy and EPP pathway programmes. In the year ahead I will be providing further resource to this to produce more quality cricketers.

Archie Lenham, Dan Ibrahim, Charlie Tear, James Coles and the most recent addition from our Academy to our professional playing staff, Bertie Foreman, all represented England during the winter.

We should be incredibly proud of this and added to the other 11 home grown players in our squad shows how important the Academy, EPP and player pathway is to health of the club. Former Academy players Tom Haines and Jack Carson went on the England Lions winter tour so the future is bright.

The girls’ pathway also continues to develop players into the newly formed Southern Vipers Academy programme based at BACA, and on into the Southern Vipers senior team and then international recognition. Freya Kemp continued her emergence into the women’s game and was rewarded with her first England central contract.

It is not only players we continue to develop but also sought-after people, the two programmes mentioned have coaches leading the programmes who came through Sussex’s system in Michael Yardy (England Lions) and Ian Cox (Southern Vipers

Our partnership with BACA continues to grow and gain momentum with a number of players now enjoying the quality cricket provision and opportunities within a state school, supported by our coaches. Former Sussex and Pakistan all-rounder Yasir Arafat is working closely with Matt Parsons on the Crawley Urban Plan so that cricketers from Crawley can gain access to the BACA opportunity, while Frankie Cripps is the second Academy player to come out of the BACA programme and we look forward to more from him in the year ahead.

Looking ahead we still need to be able to get the maximum amount of contact time between our best coaches and our better young players to continue to develop the quality of players that feeds into the professional squad.

Here’s to a bright summer of cricket for the club.

Keith Greenfield, Director of Pathways and Cricket Partnerships