In a new regular feature, Cricket Scotland President, Sue Strachan, shares an insight into the work that she does.
It has now been 6 months since I took up position as President of Cricket Scotland. In a year where almost no cricket has been played it feels somewhat as if we have done all the work with little of the fun stuff but I fervently hope that this is about to change as we get the 2021 cricket season started. As I write this on March 7th, the day before International Women’s Day, we have no cricket activities allowed in Scotland yet. Cricket is a non contact sport and played mostly outdoors (despite the weather sometimes) so we expect that the Scottish Government will soon allow us to restart our activities although with appropriate restrictions. Sport and involvement in sport is hugely helpful to improve people’s mental and physical health and to feel part of a community. We are all in great need of those things!
I thought I would start a small series of blogs to inform you of the work of Cricket Scotland and in particular answer the question… “What does the President of Cricket Scotland actually do?”
Last week I had meetings of the 2 Boards and also the Equality Delivery Group which I chair. Cricket Scotland has a slightly odd broad structure- we have the Cricket Scotland Limited (CSL) board (which I think of as the business board) which I attend as a rep of the other board, the catchily named Cricket Scotland Holdings Ltd (CSHL) board which I chair as President. The CSHL board is the Game of Cricket Board-with representatives of members, clubs and associations all coming together to ensure that Cricket Scotland understands the priorities of the membership and directs resource, financial or human, to those priority areas. We determine the direction and work with the CSL board and the staff of Cricket Scotland to make it happen. As board members our responsibilities are often based around ensuring that two way communication happens effectively so we can work as one big team to deliver the best possible value for the funding we receive and to support our clubs and associations to grow the game and reach out to everyone in Scotland and get them involved in our sport and be part of our communities.
The boards discussed how we balance the need with the available resource, how we get our representative teams more high quality cricket and how best to support clubs to come back out for 2021 after a bruising year in 2020. We in the CSHL board are working to become more effective and will be coming together in a more informal manner, albeit virtually again, later this month to discuss how we might achieve that aim and change the way we work together to enable us to do that.
The other priority for me as President is chairing the Equality Delivery Group to progress the fundamental principles of equality diversity and inclusion in all of the work that we do. This last few months we have spent time reviewing progress against our 2018-21 Equality Action Plan. We have come so far but there is also a great deal of work to do in the future. We now have representatives from all parts of the game and a priority for this year is to deliver training to our staff boards and associations then to support them in their work.
One of the first jobs we have done is to add “Inclusion” as one of the Cricket Scotland core values as only with inclusion will we develop true diversity. The work of our development team in key areas of women and girls, disability and ethnically diverse communities, supported by our charitable partners will underpin that we are serious about increasing the diversity in everything that we do. We don’t want to just talk the talk we are definitely prepared to walk the walk!
Enough for now. I hope I have made a start in communicating to anyone interested what it is that I am doing in my role as president. I plan to follow this with regular updates and in the summer snippets and photo of the places I go and the people I meet as President of Cricket Scotland!
