On Saturday evening there were nearly 100 of us at the NDCC Awards Dinner at the Commodore Hotel, a wonderful evening so thank you all for coming and supporting the event and to Matt Dart and James Woolaway for organising it. Mark Overton ran a game of “Higher or Lower” during dinner which raised £401 for the club, half of which is being donated to the Merrick family towards their travel costs to visiting our valued player Mike Merrick in hospital following the very nasty head injury that he suffered in an accident a few weeks ago – our thoughts are with him and his family through the process of recovery.
For those of you that were there, there were four important things that I forgot to mention;
- Thanks to Frank Biederman and Brett Mason, who ran our Sunday North Devon League 2nd and 1st XI’s respectively, we finished second in both leagues and never failed to fulfil a fixture, both great achievements. The Sunday sides are a great opportunity for our younger and less experienced players to play alongside our overseas players, and this worked particularly well this year.
- Our junior section goes from strength to strength under the excellent leadership of Stuart Ware and his team of age group managers; these boys and girls are the future of the club and we are particularly grateful to Stuart and his team for all the hard work they put in. It was another very successful season for NDCC in the North Devon Youth League – u10’s winners, u11’s second, u13’s winners, u15’s 4th.
- The Christmas luncheon scheduled for Sunday 11th December will not be going ahead this year.
- The pavilion extension has proved to be a great success and a massive thank you to Tony Richards for managing this project…..now that our pavilion really is an excellent venue for an event, we need to use it! Please do use it during the close season, either for cricket club social events or hire it for your private parties or celebrations. If you are interested in booking it, please contact Matt Dart on matthew.dart@openreach.co.uk
Finally for those of you that were not at the Commodore on Saturday, here is a summary of the award winners;
North Devon Tarka Ladies (Devon Womens League Champions for the second successive year)
Best Fielder – Eluned Davies
Most Improved player – Kate Williams
Players’ player – Lydia Clements
Cricketer of the Year – Alli Kelly
NDCC Saturday 3rd XI (4th in Devon Cricket League 2nd XI C Division East)
Cricketer of the Year – Archie Popham
NDCC Saturday 2nd XI (4th in Devon Cricket League 2nd XI Premier)
Cricketer of the Year – Rob Ayre
NDCC Saturday 1st XI (5th in Devon Cricket League Premier)
Norman Rattenbury Tankard for Fielding – Josh King
Club Captain’s Cup – Josh King
Roy Tamlyn Cup (for most improved young player) – Tom Ansell
Players’ player – Tom Ansell
Bill Shepherd Memorial Cup for Cricketer of the Year – Kyle Verreynne
Club Awards
Peter Yandell Cup for club man of the year – Mark Ansell
Tom Allin Memorial Cup for “breakthrough” cricketer of the year – Jed Foster
Weekly winter nets will start at Bideford College for our juniors on Thursday 26th January 7pm-9pm.
Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year!
Mark Ansell
Chairman.
