Under 9s Club Cricket in 2026!
Wiltshire Cricket is delighted to launch information about Under 9s Club Cricket festivals for 2026, including information on how clubs can express interest in entering and hosting Under 9s (and Under 7s/8s) festivals next season!
Over the past three years, Wiltshire Cricket, with the fantastic engagement of cricket clubs throughout Wiltshire, has developed a fantastic Under 9s festival programme.
What happened in 2025?
In 2025, we saw fantastic levels of Under 9s activity:
- 27 clubs participated in Under 9s fixtures
- 24 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, Corsham and Swindon.
This represented continued growth and profile of Under 9s Cricket and we are looking forward to building on this again in 2026.
The management and administration of Under 9s Cricket:
In 2026, 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
- Collect responses to enable us to create a list lead contacts for Under 9s Cricket at each club
- Collate dates of festivals that clubs will host in 2026
- During the season, we will collate results / participation from all Under 9s festivals and uploaded this to our play-cricket website.
For Clubs Attention: Under 9s Activity in 2026 – Please confirm your club’s involvement!
To help us gauge Under 9s Cricket activity for 2026 we have today emailed all clubs with an Under 9s expression of interest form. This is to be completed by Friday 6th February.
Based on the information we collect through this form we will then contact all confirmed Under 9s clubs and lead contacts by mid-February with details of the lead contacts for Under 9s Cricket and a recommendation around dates of Under 9s festivals.
If you have not received this form or would like to discuss Under 9s Cricket in more detail, please contact Lisa Farr:
Would clubs be interested in Under 7 / 8s Cricket?
As part of the information form, we have asked some questions about Under 7/8s cricket. One of our observations from 2025 was that the Under 9s festivals can see quite a mixture of ability levels and experience levels between players. Whilst these scenarios are generally well managed by the clubs involved, it is inevitably the case that at such a young age the differences in age between an Under 7/8 and an Under 9 can exacerbate the differences in playing ability and experience. With many clubs fielding players from across both Under 7/8s and Under 9s we are keen to explore whether there might be interest in scheduling a handful of Under 8 only festivals in addition (not in place of) to the programme of Under 9 festivals.
