England World Cup winner Chris Woakes visits his former school to promote the Barclays Knight-Stokes Cup, a cricket competition for state schools aimed at increasing youth participation. Woakes highlights the lack of opportunities for state school children compared to private schools and hopes the initiative will help develop future professional players. Finals will be held at Lord's in September.
England World Cup winner Chris Woakes has been back to his roots to launch a competition to get more children in state schools playing cricket.
The Warwickshire bowler coached pupils at his former school, Barr Beacon School in Aldridge, before their first game. The first round of matches in the Barclays Knight-Stokes Cup, which is run by the MCC Foundation purely for state schools, was held on Wednesday.
"It's just great to see kids enjoying the sport and having the opportunity to play it, both boys and girls," he said. Nearly 60% of professional players in England were educated privately and Woakes played in teams for his country where the percentage was higher than that. He was already in love with cricket when he was a pupil at the school, but there were not many opportunities to play the game.
Woakes told BBC Midlands Today he thought he played "one cricket match in my time at school here for the school". Finals for boys and girls teams will take place at Lord's in September. David Dawes, from Barr Beacon School, said: "To get the popularity of cricket up at our school is a real big thing in PE.
"We often lose our children to football, basketball, badminton, the more popular sports, so to be involved in this is incredible. "Woakes said "private schools and independent schools naturally have more opportunities" to play the game. Cricket was "not the easiest sport to be able to just pick up a bat and a ball and go and play", he added.
"But opportunities like this will just hopefully in the future be able to create more opportunities for players to go on to play professional sport. "Fourteen kittens abandoned in a bag
Cricket State Schools Chris Woakes Youth Sports Barclays Knight-Stokes Cup
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