This is the 2nd in a series of guest articles from Darren Talbot of Darren Talbot Cricket Coaching and Head of Coach Mentoring at Surrey County Cricket Club. To read part 1, click here

Over the past decade cricket clubs have worked hard to get their junior sections more formally organised with qualified coaches, good player to coach ratios and generally much better sessions for young cricketers.

Older junior cricketers get many years of weekly, structured, brilliantly organised training sessions with a qualified coach.

Then they start going to senior training.

Ah.

How many senior coaching sessions are

• regular and regularly attended
• structured
• even slightly organised
• run by a qualified coach

The short answer is very few. Yet this is key to young player retention.

At 16, 17 or 18 no young player is near the finished article. They need to continue to have regular properly coached training sessions.

What happens instead?

He bowls for an hour and a half non-stop to the senior players and then, if he is lucky, get a 5 or 10 minute bat in the gloom facing the wicketkeeper bowling. (Who really just want to be in the shower but feels guilty enough to keep going.)

This is not how you are going to retain your junior players.

The most important thing to remember is, if they are good enough and old enough to come, treat them the same way as all the other senior players.

Mentoring

A great way to smooth the transition from junior to senior cricket is provide each young player progressing with a senior mentor.

Ideally this would be someone who is likely to train with him and play in the same team for the season.

This provides the young players with the feeling that he is part of a bigger picture and not just making up the numbers.

My course, Better Senior Net Training Sessions, deals with this issue in by showing you what can be done to improve your training sessions. I urge you to pick up a copy if you recognise your club nets from the above!

With some careful planning and thought about training you can fire your youngsters passion for cricket and make it more fun than computer game alternatives.