Another successful year of Girls Easter Camps

This year is the fourth year that we have run the Cricket Leinster Easter Camps for the U13 and U15 Girls. It was a great success with a total of 51 girls taking part between Monday and Thursday this week across the age groups. We have just introduced, for the first year, an U11 Girls one-day camp which was well attended and proved a very fruitful exercise with some great talent coming through. It was wonderful to see the spread of girls from different clubs, including Cabintelly, Clontarf, Malahide, North County, Pheonix, The Hills and YMCA. We only hope to grow on the numbers and in the future perhaps, if numbers and funding allow, run interprovincial matches at this age group. However, for the time being we are continuing on from last year and have organised an U11 Girls Summer Camp to take place in Civil Service CC on August 17^th-19^th. Details of which will be published online in the coming weeks.

The U13s sessions had a great atmosphere of learning and enthusiasm. We had a total of 24 girls in attendance from a range of clubs: Clontarf, Leinster, Merrion, North County, Pembroke, Phoenix and The Hills. They engaged well with all the different skills they were introduced to throughout the 3 days and were very good with drawing on their knowledge from the winter sessions they came to.

In addition to these camps we ran a Wicket Keeping Session on Tuesday. Fintan McAllister, assisted by Diarmuid Lynch, delivered a fantastic session. Very well attended with an increase in numbers from last year to a total of ten. 15 players were originally registered to attend which gives us all hope that through continued development in this area we might see another Mary Waldron come out of the woodwork some day!

The purpose of these camps are not only to keep the girls interested and keen in the game but to give them a good taste of top coaching. It’s with great thanks that we need to acknowledge the County Councils’ support they have given the game of cricket in Leinster. We had the experience of Reinhardt Strydom (Fingal CC), Kenny Carroll (South Dublin CC), Amy Kenealy (South Dublin CC), Fintan McAllistar (Dublin City County Council), Caoilfhionn Rowan (Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown) and of course the Cricket Leinster Development Manager Brían O'Rourke all coaching this week. In addition we also had Naomi Scott-Hayward, Laura Erskine and Diarmuid Lynch all sharing their coaching tips with the girls.

For a list of all those in attendance please see below.