Sky Sports Rewards and Recognition Scheme

Charlotte Burton wins award for services to grassroots Cricket

This summer, the second year of the Sky Sports Coach Reward and Recognition Scheme is taking place as part of the Sky Sports Developing the Coaches sponsorship. Sky Sports is keen to not only create more cricket coaches throughout the country, but also to reward long-serving & distinguished coaches throughout the counties.

80 coaches across the country are being recognised for outstanding service to the community throughout the season. On 25th June at The Oval, Charlotte Burton was presented with her award by Nasser Hussain, a Sky Sports commentator, thanking her for all her services to grassroots cricket.

The reasons Charlotte Burton won this award were because:

• Charlotte, at only 26 years of age has made huge coaching achievements through her long involvement with Sussex Women’s Cricket and since her qualification as a coach in 1999.
• She has played junior and senior women’s cricket at county level (Sussex) for the past 17 years with much title success coming in recent years in the company of team members that Charlotte coached when they were county juniors.
• She is currently in process of gaining UKCC L3 coach qualification and was appointed WOMEN & GIRLS COMMUNITY COACH by the Sussex CB in 2006.
• For the last 6 years she has been SUSSEX WOMANS JUNIOR ORGANISER and has been involved in coaching the county U11, U13, U15 and U17 team squads for 8 years.
• She also has a long standing involvement with coaching in schools and by this means has promoted cricket for girls and made a pathway for them to the clubs.
• She has coached in at least 16 clubs in the county that have women/girls teams and has recently been responsible for creating a County Senior Woman’s League (8 teams) and a junior girls league (8 clubs) in the west half of the county.

In addition to rewarding long-standing servants of cricket coaching, Sky Sports is currently working in partnership with the ECB to provide Sky Sports coaching scholarships for new coaches throughout the country including Europe.

In the first year, the Sky Sports ECB Coach Education Programme reached over 5500 coaches throughout the country, 50% more then had been targeted for.

This year, the scheme will look to reach thousands more cricket coaches, involving schools and clubs nationwide.

Sky Sports are one of the major contributors towards ECB grassroots cricket, whose grass roots participation figures rose by 27% in the last year.

This scheme will support the development of 1.25 million youngsters each year throughout the 38 counties.