The first time Cole Pearce came to Lynnfield school in Hartlepool, the children didn’t know who he was or what he wanted. Pearce was carrying a bag crammed with plastic stumps and bats, and when the kids saw it one asked if Pearce was going to teach them tennis.
Lynnfield is close by Victoria Park, home of the town’s football team, and if the kids there played anything at all then that was the sport. Pearce is a wicketkeeper himself, and a good one. He played for Durham’s second XI, came through their academy with Ben Stokes. But he didn’t mention it. There was no point. Most of the children didn’t even recognise a cricket bat, let alone know who used them.
Pearce works for the Lord’s Taverners Wicketz programme, which is designed to bring the game to young children in deprived urban areas. There are 16 Wicketz projects running around the country. Hartlepool is Pearce’s beat. He has all the trappings of a coach, the tracksuit, kit, and plastic cones, but watching him work on a Tuesday afternoon he seems more like a big brother than another teacher. He treats them with affectionate exasperation, and has a jocular, joshing authority. Which works, because Wicketz is not about teaching kids to keep their elbows high when they play a cover drive.
The Taverners have been running Wicketz in London since 2012. Hartlepool was one of the first places it moved to when they decided to expand beyond the capital. The statistics show six of Hartlepool’s 11 wards are among the most deprived areas in the country, in the bottom 10%, and that almost a third of the children in the town live in poverty. Those problems date back to the 1960s but Hartlepool has new difficulties, too. Its makeup is predominantly white but the number of nationalities living there has doubled in recent years, and there are now 46 altogether.
In 2015, when Wicketz launched in Hartlepool, the council published a special report on hate crime in the region. It showed that reported incidents had risen by 33% in the previous year and that just under 90% of those crimes were to do with religion, race, or faith. At the same time, a council survey found that fewer residents believed that “people from different ethnic backgrounds get along together” and that “fewer people felt part of their community”. Hate crime has continued to rise, especially in the central wards that surround Lynnfield school.
The Wicketz classes are free and open to everyone between eight and 16. When Pearce started them he had to run separate sessions for the kids from south Asian backgrounds and everyone else. But over time he brought the two groups together.
“It took a few weeks,” he says. “The kids wanted to stay in their own groups, they’d say: ‘Why do we have to mix?’ and: ‘We don’t want to.’ I kept telling them we were trying to build a team.” They had a few drop out, but not as many as they had join in when the sessions were finally integrated.
There was tension. In those early mixed classes, Pearce had to walk some of the children home afterwards because the rows between the two groups were so bad. He does a lot of pastoral work like this. At Wicketz they often fit in classes around cricket. They try to target them to the needs of the regions they are working in. Early on, Pearce found that some of his kids were binge drinking, after a 14-year-old boy told him that he’d had to have his stomach pumped, so they have been doing work on alcohol awareness.
They’ve had talks on diet, nutrition and social media, too. Just little five-minute lectures, short and sharp, before the kids get back to whacking the soft balls around. In Hartlepool there’s a real problem with youth unemployment, and the Wicketz national manager, Dan Wilson, wants to tailor the programme towards that. He is one of the great enthusiasts. As soon as it has occurred to him that some of the older kids might want to help out with the coaching, he’s over talking to them, telling them that if they want to participate they can earn new qualifications for their CVs.
On the day I’m there, they are already at it. Some of the older Asian kids are helping the younger white ones with their grips. There must be 35 children altogether, a real mix, boys and girls, all ages and backgrounds. Lynnfield’s playing area is the only green space in the district, so the school keeps it open to everyone during daylight hours. A lot of people, many of them former pupils, pop along to watch. The deputy head, Kate McIntyre, is one of them. “This is my kind of charity,” she says, “because it’s run by people who are invested in our community. They’re here every week, making an impact.”
These days, McIntyre says, cricket is as popular as football at the school. “Every day now they’re playing cricket up against the wall, and they’re always pestering us: ‘When’s Cole coming, when can we play again?’”
Wicketz is not going to fix Hartlepool’s problems with stumps and plastic bats but Pearce is here three times a week, every week, trying to help. Building a community takes time and patience and, like any partnership, it comes little by little, run by run. “We have 30 different languages spoken at our school,” McIntyre says, “but sport is a universal language.”
