Four Brighton and Hove schools are due to take part in a beach cricket competition as part of a national campaign to promote the sport.
Children from the four primary schools will be given guidance by a professional cricketer at the Yellowave Beach Sports Venue in Madeira Drive.
Youngsters from St Margaret’s CE School, in Rottingdean, Patcham Junior School, St Luke’s Primary School, in Queen’s Park, and Mile Oak Primary School, in Portslade, will play each other.
Their schools are among 4,000 to have registered for the Brit Insurance National Cricket Day on Thursday 23 June as part of the Chance to Shine campaign.
Chance to Shine is one of the biggest grass-roots sport for development programmes ever undertaken in Britain.
The scheme is run by the Cricket Foundation charity and helps link cricket clubs to state schools.
Coaching
It aims, initially, to reach two million children in a third of all state schools by 2015.
Children can look forward to cricket-themed lessons in class, coaching in the playground and competitions at local cricket clubs.
The Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, is the president and co-founder of Chance to Shine and he helped start the campaign in 2005.
Mr King said that Thursday 23 June would be the biggest festival of cricket ever held in Great Britain.
He said: “It’s a day on which we hope that the qualities engendered by cricket can extend beyond the cricket pitch and into the classroom.”
The charity behind Chance to Shine has devised special cricket-themed lessons to give the curriculum a cricketing twist.
For example, children will learn the difference between acute and obtuse angles in maths through a range of cricket shots, and identify the cricket playing counties in geography.
The charity’s web-based resource, CricEd, covers citizenship, humanities, literacy and numeracy.
Benefits
The England captain Andrew Strauss spoke passionately about the charity and the educational benefits of cricket.
He said: “There’s so much about cricket that prepares you for life: working in a team, communicating with other people, getting out and being active and learning how to win and how to lose.
“So many kids these days don’t have the opportunity to play cricket in their schools.
“Chance to Shine has enabled over a million children to be able to play who wouldn’t have otherwise played in the last six years.
“Ultimately, that’s where the next generation of England cricketers is going to come from.”
Wasim Khan, chief executive of the Cricket Foundation, said: “Across Britain, cricket will unite children and teachers, clubs and schools on 23 June.
“Brit Insurance National Cricket Day is a great opportunity for us to celebrate the achievements of Chance to Shine which has had an impact on so many young lives over the past six years.”
Further details of can be found at www.ncd.chancetoshine.org.
