News
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10 JAN
Jeff Levick, Chairman of Hampshire Cricket Board, is awarded an MBE
The New Year Honours list was announced at the end of December 2011 and we are pleased to announce that Jeff Levick, Chairman of Hampshire Cricket Board, was awarded an MBE for more than 50 years’ service to grass-roots cricket in the county and, as Head of the ECB’s Regional Disability Cricket Development Forum for the South and West, has been instrumental in developing disability cricket in the Hampshire region.
It was Jeff who, in 1997, set up the Disability Cricket Programme in Hampshire which still runs to this day. Bluebird Care became the principal sponsor of the team in 2011 and the team is now known as the Bluebird Care Hampshire Disability Cricket team. Jeff sourced funding, recruited players, set up and ran coaching sessions and trained new coaches. He’s also responsible for establishing a Special Schools Coaching Programme providing opportunities for over 1,000 young people with disabilities every year. Jeff’s love affair with cricket started as a 14 year old at Littleton Cricket Club (in Winchester) and developed as he became an esteemed junior cricket coach (recreational and elite) as well as a qualified umpire who stood on the South Coast Panel and an Umpire Assessor.
Commenting on the development of disability cricket, Jeff said, ‘At the moment, Disability Cricket in the UK tends to be top-down driven. In other words, there are England teams, but underneath that the actual infrastructure is not very high. We’re one of the unusual counties in as much as we have, underneath what we produce in the way of County and England players, we coach over 1,000 disabled people every year and have done for the last eight to ten years.’