How to run a village cricket club: the volunteer’s admin guide.

The committee: who does what

Most village clubs run on five to eight volunteers. The trick is giving each job one clear owner, so nothing lands on the same two people.

• One owner per job. Two people “helping with fixtures” means nobody is doing fixtures.
• A junior section needs its own coordinator, not one more job for the secretary: running a junior section.
• A deputy for the key roles, especially treasurer and Welfare Officer. Holidays happen.
• Write each job down on one page in a shared folder, so a handover takes an evening, not a season.

The Club Welfare Officer isn’t optional. Clubs affiliated to their county cricket board need one, along with a safeguarding policy, and anyone working with juniors needs the right checks. The ECB’s safeguarding pages set out what’s required.

The weekly match-day rhythm

In season, running the club is mostly one cycle repeated every week. Get the cycle right and the season looks after itself.

Monday to Wednesday: availability

Captains need to know who’s free before they can pick. A WhatsApp poll works until you run three teams with two fixtures on a Saturday. Good availability means players answer once per match day, not once per team; every captain sees the same list; and reminders go only to players who haven’t answered. WhatsApp polls vs availability apps.

Wednesday to Thursday: selection

• Agree a selection order at the start of the season: 1s pick first, then 2s, then the Sunday XI.
• Publish one team sheet per side by Thursday evening, with meet time, venue and scorer.
• Ask every selected player to confirm. A silent player on Thursday is a missing player on Saturday.

Write the rules down: a selection policy template. And for everything else on a captain’s plate, the captain’s weekly checklist.

Saturday: match day

The captain’s list is long enough already: the toss, the umpiring rota, scoring, teas. Two admin jobs still belong on the day, because they’re easiest then: request match fees from the eleven who played, and mark cash paid before anyone leaves the ground.

Sunday to Monday: results and stats

Scorecards go on Play-Cricket, ideally entered by the scorer on the day. This is also when players are most interested in the club, which is worth using. At Brookweald, a public MVP leaderboard built from the scorecards became the thing players checked every weekend. Because they were already opening the app for their points, next week’s availability was one more tap rather than another ignored message.

The season calendar

The AGM

Hold it in winter, when people have time. Circulate the accounts, the fees proposal and committee nominations at least two weeks before. Keep it under an hour and open the bar afterwards. An AGM agenda template and timeline, then the pre-season checklist for January to April.

Subs, match fees and awards

Set fees at the AGM from what the season actually costs, not from habit: what clubs charge and how to cost your own. And plan the autumn early: end-of-season awards are far easier when the numbers have been kept all summer.

Money: the job everyone avoids

Ask any village club for its hardest job and the answer is usually the treasurer’s. Not the bookkeeping: the chasing. “I’ll transfer you later” in the group chat, a captain with a pocket of cash, and a spreadsheet that stops matching the bank by July. Three things fix most of it:

1. Charge against the team sheet, so the fee goes to exactly the players who played.
2. Make paying one tap. Apple Pay or Google Pay from a link beats copying a sort code.
3. Keep one ledger for cash, card and transfers, so the totals always add up.

The treasurer’s guide to collecting match fees goes through the weekly routine and how to clear arrears. When subs and fees aren’t enough, fundraising ideas that actually raise money.

Tools: what to use

You don’t need much software. You need the right few things, and everyone using them.

• Play-Cricket for fixtures, results and scorecards. It’s the ECB’s system and leagues require it.
• A WhatsApp group for chat, banter and lifts. What belongs in it, and what doesn’t.
• A bank account with online banking that two committee members can see.

The gaps are availability, selection, match fees and keeping players interested between Saturdays. When you compare club apps, check that they sync from Play-Cricket, handle several teams sharing one pool of players, pay fee money into the club’s own account, don’t take a percentage, and are something players will actually open. Which club apps work with Play-Cricket.

And keep an eye on numbers: a club that loses players faster than it finds them has a retention problem, not a recruitment one. How to recruit players and keep them.

MVP Cricket was built inside a village club for exactly this. It syncs from Play-Cricket every morning, runs availability, selection and team sheets, collects match fees into the club’s own Stripe account with no percentage taken, and gives players a public MVP leaderboard. Brookweald ran a full season on it: 40+ members and more than £7,000 in match fees. Read how the season went.

Questions committees ask

MVP Cricket is the author’s product.