Rayleigh CC Round Up: Important Pre-Season News & Updates

Rayleigh CC Round Up: Important Pre-Season News & Updates

Welcome to New Players

The Club would like to welcome the following new adults members for this season:

Sreejith Gopalan
Sarath Kotamarthi
Jamie Lawson
Piers Pattison
Siva Ranjan

Personal Trainer GrouP Sessions

As part of our ongoing strategy to improve overall fitness levels across the Club this season, we are excited to announce the launch of new Personal Trainer Group Sessions at Rawreth Lane. We are pleased to offer these sessions completely free of charge for adult members. Sessions kick off on Wednesday, 8th April, and will run weekly throughout the month, starting at 6:00 PM.

Training Update: Indoor Sessions & Outdoor Nets

Please note that all indoor training sessions at The FitzWimarc School have now concluded.

As we look to transition outdoors, please be aware that the outdoor nets at Rawreth Lane are not yet ready for use. Any bookings made via the website over the last week have unfortunately had to be declined. For safety reasons, no member is permitted to use the outdoor nets until the Club officially confirms they are safe to reopen, at which point valid bookings will be required.

We will confirm outdoor training dates and times in the coming weeks. The ground is currently still very wet, so we will need a stretch of considerably better weather before outdoor training can safely resume for the 2026 season.

Working Day: Saturday 28th March

As we get ready for the upcoming season, it’s time to get our grounds and facilities looking their absolute best. There are significant works required at the Club over the coming weeks before the start of the season. Some of the jobs include:

Fitting tarp sheets to covers
Install panels to the sightscreen frames
Erect boundary netting on the main ground
Paint the top of boundary boards
Erect new boundary boards
Organise and tidy all changing room and pavilion facilities
Painting the clubhouse and scoreboard frontages

Whether you are a licensed electrician or just someone happy to push a broom or wield a paintbrush, we need you. Please arrive from 9am on Saturday 28th March and help support the Club.

Updates from the Selection Committee

Since the Annual General Meeting (AGM) in January, your newly elected Club Captains have hit the ground running and are starting to shape our playing squads for the 2026 season. It is a fantastic time for the Club – with fresh faces coming on board and our youth players eager to step up into adult cricket. To manage this growth effectively and fairly, we are rolling out some important new policies to support how we track match availability and handle team selection.

Availability Tracking:

The Club has decided to introduce an availability tracking tool for the 2026 season called Spond. Spond is an easy to use and free to download app for your smartphone (both iOS and Android) which is already used by our youth teams.

If you want to play adult cricket on a Saturday, you are required to register for Spond and respond to availability requests. There are no exceptions. If you do not respond to availability requests, you will not be made available for selection.

Independent Selector & Selection Framework

We are pleased to announce that Tom Osbourn has joined the Selection Committee for the 2026 season in the newly created role of Independent Selector. Tom’s primary responsibility will be to support our captains by providing an objective perspective. His core duties include:

Ensuring Impartiality: Acting as a neutral voice to reduce bias and politics.
Driving Club-First Decisions: Helping to balance squads across all teams.
Supporting Tough Calls: Acting as a neutral mediator to help captains navigate difficult decisions.
Maintaining Consistency: Ensuring the Club’s selection framework is applied consistently.

To support this, all captains have agreed to operate under a new, unified Selection Framework for the 2026 season. It ensures that we can play the highest possible level of competitive cricket, while actively providing our youth players with a clear platform to perform, develop, and succeed in senior cricket.

Tom Osbourn

Independent Selector
selection@rayleighcc.com

New Website Launch

The Club is pleased to announce that the Rayleigh CC website has been fully updated with the aim of improving usability, accessibility and how we share information across the Club. The following changes have been made:

Full Redesign: The entire website has been redesigned.
Website Structure: Complete overhaul of the website structure, page directories and navigation.
Integration of Live Play Cricket Data: Fixtures, results and stats are now fully included, synched directly with Play Cricket.
Integration of Live Streams: All live streams and highlights packages are now fully integrated into the website and update automatically with YouTube.
New Sections: Additional pages have been added, specifically for player and team profiles, Club history and others

The new website is scheduled for launch w/c 23rd March. Keep an eye out on socials, email and other Club channels.