Volunteers Week, which was celebrated last week, highlights the hard work of those people who give their time, skills and passion to help the game thrive at the grassroots level, writes Huzaifa Yousafzai.
Volunteers play a huge part in keeping the game running smoothly with most of their work happening behind the scenes, but the impact is felt every matchday. Every club has those people who turn up early, lock up late and make sure everything in between actually works. They’re sorting the fixtures, balancing the budgets, checking the safeguarding plans, updating websites, fixing things that break and noticing those things others miss. For Acton CC, a club in West London which plays in the Middlesex League, John Reeve has been the go-to volunteer or a long time.
Having just ended a 22-year stint as club chairman, alongside starting a programme to help young offenders through cricket, Reeve speaks about his years of volunteering and how important it is to keep cricket clubs running in the day to day, as well as the long-term.
“At 20 I joined the committee and over the next 37 years I held almost every position, including Secretary, Junior Manager, Coach, Captain, Vice President and Chair,” says Reeve.
“My main role as chair was to keep the club together – we had no form of income as 80 per cent of our subs went to the landlords. It was about dotting the I's and crossing the T's and keeping us all up to speed so that we were complying with the ECB Clubmark,” he adds.
“Saturday morning would see me getting down to the club early, opening the clubhouse, letting the cleaners in and making sure the dressing rooms were tidy. Then I would clear all the stuff out of the umpire's room that had been dumped in there during the week, before keeping the groundsman happy by making him a coffee and helping him where I could,” explains Reeve.
“After being first to arrive in the morning, I'd be last to leave at night as I would lock up and put the security alarm on before going home.”
Outside of Acton CC, Reeve sat on the Middlesex County Cricket League committee and led a cricket programme that looked to improve the lives of inmates at a Youth Offenders Prison.
“Someone told me they wanted to take cricket into the prison because they were only doing football and rugby. So I wrote a programme based on the acronym of cricket starting with character, resilience, integrity, courage, knowledge, education and trust. It’s got life skills, which I equates to running between the wickets as you've got to trust your partner.
“The programme could teach any human being but works well in prisons because cricket hasn't got any physical contact. With football and rugby, you can have a bad tackle that just sets off a chain of events that ends in violence, whereas with cricket, you haven't really got that contact.”
The programme Reeve devised was such a success that not only did it directly benefit the inmates, it also attracted visitors from the top of the sport as well as local religious leaders.
“We had some great visitors such as the head Imam from a London mosque as well as former professional cricketers like Simon Hughes and Chris Lewis. It was such a success that the prison guards gave everyone £10 phone credit, which is pretty much unheard of!”
Yet the biggest impact came outside the prison walls, as Reeve explains. “What usually happens at Feltham is that the inmates would get picked up by their friends and would be given a bag of weed to sell on the street and get straight back to business.
“Feltham youth offenders had an 80 per cent return rate, so kids would leave and only 20 per cent of them would avoid returning to prison. Our plan was to reduce the return rate by 10 per cent, which would save the government over a million pounds because it costs over £100,000 pounds a year for a prisoner to be in prison. The course cost us £10,000 so it was an absolute no-brainer.”
The programme had further incentives to promote engagement from the inmates as strong commitment would earn them a new shot at life once they left the prison gates.
“The top five performers on each programme would get a package when they left, where they would be met at the gate by a social worker who took them to their brand new flat with two months’ money and a job at a Costa, McDonald's or Subway,” says Reeve.
His exceptional work for the West London community was rewarded when he earnt a special trip to HQ for England’s Test match against Ireland in 2019.
“The Cricketer ran a competition for the best all-round cricket person in the country and I won it so I was rewarded by getting to ring the five-minute bell at Lord’s.”
