Meet Brychan Tudor, Glamorgan's newest recruit and our first ever Schools Community Coach.
Brychan will be working closely with schools and communities throughout Wales as the club looks to grow the game and engage and inspire new audiences.
Find out more about Brychan, his new role and our school visits:
What’s your background in cricket?
I’ve been a cricket coach for eleven years. I started at Dinas Powys Cricket Club and they were brilliant in allowing me to develop and improve my coaching skills.
From there, I progressed to being a coach on Cricket Wales’ regional pathway for Cardiff and The Vale. I worked there for eight years before it became East Wales under the new structure. Over the same period, I’ve also coached in schools as part of the ECB’s Chance to Shine programme, besides working for Glamorgan Cricket as a casual coach at the National Cricket Centre when school groups have visited Sophia Gardens, and also as part of the ‘Beyond the Boundaries’ project.
Can you tell us about your new role as Schools Community Coach?
It’s a really exciting and brand-new role at Glamorgan so there is plenty of scope for it to grow and develop over time.
My lead responsibility is to further build the profile of the Club within the local community by delivering sessions at schools and creating opportunities for children to learn about cricket, and gain experience of playing the game.
I will also be working closely with the existing members of the Community team at Glamorgan Cricket, including Andrew Hignell and Paul Edwards who oversee visits to Sophia Gardens and, in particular, the CC4 Museum of Welsh Cricket where a series of inspirational visits have been developed for girls and boys, plus some fantastic match-day opportunities at both Glamorgan games as well as the high-profile international matches.
What type of school visits do Glamorgan offer?
We offer a wide range of opportunities all year round.
Schools can visit Sophia Gardens and go on a stadium tour on non-match days and learn about so many aspects of playing cricket as well as local history. They can learn about other themes, such as playing safe, the diet of a cricketer and the positive impact of international cricket on the local economy. There are also sessions which deal with the benefits of playing sport, as well as physical well-being, teamwork, and captaincy, plus the environmental issues relating to Sophia Gardens as a whole.
Whatever topic the school chooses, all of the visits to Sophia Gardens will see the children enjoying a skills-drills and softball play session in the Indoor School which was specifically created, thanks to a series of generous grants and Sports Council funding, to promote the playing of cricket.
We also welcome pupils on match-days when we have a programme of literacy and numeracy projects, with the visiting pupils also having an opportunity to form the Guard of Honour, besides playing softball cricket on the outfield during the lunch interval.
We can also deliver all of these topics during visits to schools. Our community team will bring the cricket-related equipment to the school and engage the children in a series of stimulating and fun activities in their play spaces. We can also deliver a wide range of talks in their classrooms and link in with the school’s schemes of work and project-related activities.
Who are the school visits for?
We want to engage as many children as possible across every type of neighbourhood, particularly the ethnically diverse communities and some of the deprived inner-city areas.
Age isn’t a barrier either as we cater for pupils from primary and secondary schools. We also have groups of college and university students who visit us on an annual basis.
My colleagues have already done some fantastic work, especially the Riverside Challenge where a group of primary schools as part of the Fitzalan cluster have played a softball cricket tournament in the National Cricket Centre. I`m really looking forward to developing this concept in other parts of Cardiff and have already had some great conversations with schools in other clusters in the Roath and Cathays area. In mid-November Paul Edwards and myself also went to Cardiff West Community College on three consecutive days to deliver classroom and softball play sessions to around 500 pupils from Years 7 and 8.
The National Cricket Centre reopened for cricketing activities at the start of October 2021 and, since then, we have delivered talks and skills drills sessions to over 2,000 pupils. The Cardiff-based schools have been our initial focus because they’re literally on our doorstep, but we want to get wider than that and conversations are currently ongoing with several schools in the Vale as well as in RCT, Caerphilly and the Newport area.
We want to be in a position where everyone across Wales knows that Glamorgan Cricket is here and is their Club. It’s our goal to encourage as many young people as possible to come to the Sophia Gardens ground and experience what cricket and Glamorgan is all about.
We are also going to build on the fantastic success in 2021 of The Hundred besides creating a range of family-friendly activities on T20 match-days during 2022 and beyond.
How can schools book a visit?
Booking a school visit is really simple. You can email museum@glamorgancricket.com or call 02920 419 383, and me or one of the community team will be in touch to discuss all of the exciting and inspiring options we have available.