Wiltshire Cricket releases dates of club Under 9s Festivals for the 2025 season

After two fantastic years of growth, we are delighted that even more Under 9s club cricket will be on offer in 2025, with 30 clubs and 24 festivals due to take place throughout the summer!

What happened in 2024?

In 2024, we saw really pleasing levels of Under 9s activity:

• 21 clubs participated in Under 9s fixtures
• 16 Under 9s festivals took place across Wiltshire
• A league table collating total fixtures played across all festivals was collated, with the leading clubs playing the following number of fixtures; Cricklade (29), Chippenham (28), Swindon (28)

This represented continued growth and profile of Under 9s Cricket, with the achievements of clubs celebrated at our end of season awards evening

Now as we look ahead to 2025, we are hugely excited by the prospect of even more club involvement, and even more festivals.

Why is Under 9s Cricket important?

In terms of the rationale for being so pro-active in pushing the importance of Under 9s Cricket, we would repeat some of the messaging from previous years …

Given the fantastic numbers we are seeing within All Stars and Dynamos Cricket it is really important that we have a strong Under 9s offer throughout the county in order to:

1. Capitalise on the high interest levels from our All Stars and Dynamos programmes
2. Provide exposure to the first form of competition for our young cricketers
3. Ensure there is a competition format to bridge the gap between All Stars / Dynamos and the beginning of the WYCL offer at Under 11s

Wiltshire Cricket's management and administration of Under 9s Cricket

In 2025, Wiltshire Cricket will again coordinate Under 9s activity throughout Wiltshire. As part of this role, we will do the following:

• Produce a number of resources to support clubs in running Under 9s festivals
• During the season, we will collate results / participation from all Under 9s festivals and uploaded this to our play-cricket website at; http://wiltsclubcomps.play-cricket.com
• As we have done in 2023 and 2024, we will recognise and reward the three clubs who (to our awareness) played the most Under 9s matches in the 2025 season at our Grassroots Cricket Awards evening

Under 9s Cricket in 2025

In recent weeks, Wiltshire Cricket has consulted with clubs regarding their Under 9s Cricket plans for the coming season, and through this consultation has identified the clubs that will be delivering Under 9s festivals this season. We have also collated a database of lead Under 9s contacts so that clubs can work together to arrange local fixtures in addition to festivals. We are delighted to announce that the following festivals will be taking place this summer:

In addition to the above, Wiltshire Cricket is encouraging clubs to think about running Under 8s festivals, with a couple of pilot events scheduled for 2025 as follows:

Lead contacts at clubs have been emailed with the details of who is organising each festival, therefore if your club would like to enter any of the festivals above, please speak to your Under 9 lead who will have the details on how to enter.

Additionally, if your club is not listed above but you do have capacity to enter festivals then please contact Pete Sykes and we will update our list of festivals for the coming season:

Pete Sykes

Managing Director

• [email protected]
• 07920 581413