Coronavirus: Capital Kids Cricket keeping youngsters really busy

One of the CKC challenges is set up in a garden (Image: Archant)

The registered charity adopts the approach of ‘Inspire, Challenge, Change’ to improve physical, social and emotional development of disadvantaged children and young people living in the most deprived areas of London.

And the fully inclusive organisation provides a range of sporting and social opportunities, with activities carried out in state schools, hospitals, community centres, local parks and residential centres away from London.

The UK lockdown presented particular hurdles in this regard but CKC worked quickly to come up with a plan to engage service users.

Research development and admin officer Mike Ajayi explained: “CKC immediately set out a plan of action to tackle this problem and came up with numerous methods. However, our main priority was to listen to the service users and provide a service for what they wanted.

CKC has created inter-team competitions during lockdown (Image: Archant)

“After taking this into consideration, CKC decided to do a daily challenge for one week followed by challenges every week three to four times a week.

“We used our challenges as an instant response to COVID-19 to ensure families, including parents/carers, were remaining physically active, which is a core value of CKC. We capitalised on this opportunity by providing challenges suited for all ages to ensure maximum chance of participation.

“As a result, we received amazing feedback from the parents/carers regarding the usefulness of the daily challenges. CKC lowered our supply of challenges to three to four times a week in order to keep demand for our challenges high and consistent as news of the lockdown continued to stretch, we thought our services should stretch too and in order to captivate longevity this would be the best approach.

“Furthermore, CKC did these challenges in several different group chats we were involved in to extend our service to as many people who felt they may lack physical fitness due to COVID-19. Primarily, each challenge enhanced on a participant’s cricket skills, however not all challenges focused on cricket, rather some on fitness.”

CKC has created inter-team competitions during lockdown (Image: Archant)

Prior to the challenges, CKC staff listed various ways to remain fit on YouTube, Twitter and the CKC Website Activity Zone, which received fantastic feedback.

Ajayi added: “We know the engagement has been effective because on the analytics on the Capital Kids Cricket website we immediately witnessed a boost in page counts on our Activity Zone section indicating an increase in engagement.

“CKC are doing a Saturday night quiz primarily to increase engagement of all ages and increase family interaction with CKC services. This has been effective and staff have heard positive feedback and continue to be asked ‘What is the next quiz going to be on?’.

“This quiz has had a knock-on effect and has resulted in an increased awareness of activities CKC are doing during the pandemic.

One of the CKC coaches demonstrates a challenge (Image: Archant)

“CKC then ran a large-scale cricket competition which consisted of a five-day challenge competition. Each club entering would have the number of participants and their score combined to find the club total average and a daily leaderboard was published by CKC.

“This was an immense success, even reaching cricket clubs overseas with fantastic feedback. We have been asked to do a second cricket competition and more clubs are asking to enter in the next one in addition to the 10 clubs from the first cricket competition.

“CKC plan continue to cater our services for individuals so they still feel engaged with CKC and remain fit while at home.”

One of the CKC coaches demonstrates a challenge (Image: Archant)

One of the CKC coaches demonstrates a challenge (Image: Archant)