Volunteering at Chippenham CC

Hi all,

I hope you have all enjoyed the sunny start to the cricket season. With season now underway and full focus on the cricket season over the coming weeks, I thought it an appropriate time to highlight the importance volunteers are to the club. In particular as the club grows and offers more facilities, there is a need to increase our core base of volunteers to ensure the club maximises what it can offer. 

Apart from a very small part of our coaching resource, everything the club does from, preparing pitches, ensuring the ground looks good and a safe place to be, looking after and replacing facilities, organising fixtures and teams, delivering weekly training sessions, plus all the administration that goes with this, is all done by volunteers. We are very grateful to all of those people who give up their time to make this all happen. 

However, with the increased facilities the club now has, the club would very much like to hear from anyone who feels they could give up some time to help in the following areas:

1. Facilities Manager: We need someone who has a good knowledge of buildings and keeping them maintained to help us manage both our new clubhouse and our newly extended pavilion. To be clear, we are not expecting this person to do the actual jobs that may be needed. What we do need is someone who can identify what needs to be done and when, sets up a maintenance plan and keeps a general eye on the buildings to ensure any issues that occur are quickly identified. 

2. Groundsman Team: We need to add to our team who look after the ground. Firstly, we would like to add another person or two to our team who prepare the ground on Saturday mornings for the weekend matches. This would mean being at the ground from 8.15am to around 9.45am most weeks during the summer. Training will be given and you will get involved in rolling and marking pitches and generally preparing the ground. 

Secondly, we are looking for someone with some experience of using machinery who potentially could be around in the mornings during the week. This is to provide us with some extra resource when everything is growing quickly or providing cover due to holiday/illness. 

3. General Maintenance: We are looking for people who could come to the ground between 9am and 10.30am on a Wednesday morning to help with a general clean and tidy up of the facilities. We appreciate this timing won’t work for most people but if it does please come along and help. You don’t need to come every week or be there for the whole time, even if you can just come for half an hour there are jobs you can do that may not get done otherwise. As a small incentive, there will be complimentary tea and biscuits for those that are able to make it along as well as plenty of gossip!

4. Club Admin: To ensure our ClubMark status we have a huge amount of admin that we now need to look after. If someone feels they may be able to help with this please let us know. This can range from replying to emails, ensuring players are registered, updating members on club news and confirming details about fixtures. There is lots of flexibility around this with most of the work not time critical. 

5. Bar Volunteers: Now we have the bar facility at the clubhouse we are looking for volunteers help us ensure the bar is open for all matches. To volunteer you need to first take an online training session that involves watching an 11 minute video and completing a quiz. Then there is an onsite training session before your first shift, that takes about 30 minutes. If you think you can help with this please email the club and we will send you the link for the online training.

6. Social Media: We have a huge amount going on at the club to shout about and feel we could use social media more to promote the club and champion what we are doing. If someone feels they could take on the role of looking after the club’s social media and posting material on a regular basis, please get in touch. 

Thanks for taking the time to read all this and please get in touch by emailing the club at cricketchippenham@gmail.com if you think you can help. Or pass on the message if you know anyone else who may be interested in getting involved. By expressing an interest we fully respect that you will not be committing to anything and the first step will be to explain more about each of the roles and allow you some further time to consider if you can take on the role.