Club Feature - Adamstown CC

Adamstown Cricket Club (ACC) is known to constantly be up for cricket either during the season or in the off season. They have had a lot going on post-season throughout the 2019/2020 winter, not unlike any other year!

The club hosted a blitz tournament, which is a marquee tournament for the club in September 2019, just as the season closed. It was the 11th year of the tournament and it have 12 teams of 6 players and many spectators. Following that the club organised an internal 2-day test match with 2 innings for each teams. This has now become a fixture in their schedule, both pre- and post-season.

The Winter kicked in with the club going indoors, into academy mode. The ACC Academy runs every Sunday throughout the winter and uses their local community centre in Adamstown. They welcome anyone to join for the training sessions, including beginners. Pre-Christmas they run one 2 hour session for senior training and games and one 3 hour training session for juniors. Post-Christmas they included an additional specialised training for top team players for 2 additional hours every week. The kids had drop in visits from local Cllr Paul Gogarty, who helped secure the indoor cricket facility in Adamstown Community Centre, and Mayor Vicki Casserly. The Mayor and her team helped with the development of the Corkagh park cricket facilities, which is being upgraded to include practice nets in the park. Three more of the club’s members coaching courses, run by Cricket Leinster, over the Winter to increase their coaching team.

In January, they hosted their annual gala awards night where all contributions by the players on all teams are recognised. South Dublin Mayor Vicki Casserly attended and presented many of the cups and medals. Following that ACC decided to sponsor Cricket Leinster’s new T20 Cup competition for teams in Open Divisions 16 and 17. It’ll be known as the “Adamstown Cup".

While the club have been working to build their numbers and keep their current membership active during the off-season, the Cricket Leinster Development Team in South Dublin have been creating some feeder schools for the local clubs. Naomi Scott-Hayward and Anne O’Meara have been diligently delivering introduction and refresher sessions in the South Dublin school, getting them ready for the Leprechaun Cup competitions, blitzes or simply just advertising the sport and the local cricket clubs available to them. The club has 20 different feeder schools which their 80 youth members come from.

Their main feeder schools are: Adamstown ETNS, Esker ETNS (Lucan), Citywest ETNS and St. Mary’s NS (Saggart). Naomi and her team have delivered sessions to nearly 3000 primary and secondary school goers since the start of 2020. There was a total of 4711 youths who received cricket sessions in 2019 within a school setting. Naomi was “delighted to hear” that Adamstown CC were running their first ever February Mid-term Cricket Camp.

She says “it is when clubs develop their own sustainable events that they start to get new members in and broaden the awareness of their club in their local community.” It was open to boys and girls over 10 years old and was attended by 16 kids over the two days.

In addition, the club regularly get involved at local festivals and deliver taster cricket sessions, such as at the Lucan Festival back in September. These activities and the involvement of local councillors throughout not only the cricket season, but also in the off-season only strengthen the clubs community links and ties with the locals.