Exotic_Peacock
New member
Okay so a quick little back story for this:
This board is not designed to be massive, to be open to the billions of people across the globe. Simply put this message board is more for members of the local suburb/town/city that I live in to support a local sporting organisation. Obviously to many the name raises two questions straight away:
- Where is Yarrabilba?
- What is Cricket?
Cricket, for those asking, is a global bat-and-ball sport, where it is said that it remains only second to football/soccer in terms of global participants.
So now that you have some of the lingo we will quickly get into the back story.
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We finally got the okay to become an affiliated club in August last year, it was decided that we would wait until 2020 before 'launching' mainly because the Women's and Men's Cricket World Cup (T20 - a short quick format of the game) was being hosted in Australia during 2020, we came up with a calendar that would give us an entire year of cricket programs - introducing kids aged 5-10 to the game, introducing them to competitive cricket, starting the first women's competition in and around our area, and enter junior and senior teams into the local competition (the first team since 1994 to start from scratch).
As we are a small area and still growing we worked with the other two smaller sporting organisations (Basketball/Touch Football) to work out a calendar where none of us were competing with each other, because after all it is about getting people out and active. January rolls around, we take part in a national cricket raffle where people buy their tickets online, there were three cars up for grabs (although tickets were sold at cricket clubs throughout Australia etc), we held Barbeques to try to get ourselves known... we made $80.
Why? Because at that time of the year the devastating Bush Fires that made global news was on and rightfully so people with 'spare' money provided it to the Bush Fire appeals, because at that point we ALL wanted to help those affected.
February rolls around, the fires still raging but not making big headline news... why? Because Australia was then hit with terrible flooding. We couldn't hold any fundraisers that month.
We had 22 kids register for our first program which was learning the game of cricket - they learn this through fun and active other games like 'ball-tag' to help develop hand eye co-ordination, and to get them to start listening and understanding rules etc. The 22 kids far exceeded the challenge of 7 which is what our closest 'rival' received when they first ran the same program 2 years ago.
Picture this, we are finally making money (just $10 a kid after insurance etc but hey its making money), we are just hitting the half way point of the program... then we are closed down due to the Coronavirus. Although we didn't 'have to' we believed that considering the impact that thing has globally it was the right thing to do in refunding the parents money... unfortunately most came out of my personal pocket because we didn't get rebated for the insurance and hire fees for the ground we were using.
So during lockdown, I got the idea of having a forum on our website (https://www.yarrabilbacricket.com). As one thing I believe in is advertising everywhere is important, having a website is important, because not everyone has Facebook etc. So the idea was born that this site would carry all of our information but the forum, which we have named The Pavilion Forums, could be a section where all of our players, sponsors, supporters etc can sign up and get all of our latest news, announcements, get minute meetings etc from our committee.
But that it could also play an important role - it could have sections where parents of our junior players can connect, ask for lifts for their son/daughter if they needed to, organise end of season events or even just chat about cricket.
For the senior players its a board to organise 'going to the nets for a hit' (this means practice), meet new players in other senior teams etc, a buy/sell/swap section for the trading of cricket equipment that is no longer needed or something. And off course a general area for people to chat etc.
Due to all of the outlays without even making a $ yet for anything I have had to run this on whatever 'subscriptions' or whatever I could.
There for this is running @XenForo 1.5, with UI.X from @ThemeHouse. A huge range of template modifications by various people including @BassMan, @Shelley and @AndyB and off course tips, answers on threads etc from @Brogan, @Jake Bunce, @Russ, @Mike Creuzer and co have helped take it from what it was to what it currently is.
We have it linked on our main website, but I haven't yet promoted it as I am hoping to fix it up a little bit more. But would love your feedback on the 'Work In Progress' The Pavilion Forums for the Yarrabilba Cricket Association. (For the record the colors are the team colors, orange/green and then our moniker - Cane Toad - is maroon)
https://www.yarrabilbacricket.com/forums/
Please feel free to critique, or share ideas on how I can make it better. I do plan on upgrading etc and maybe, hopefully one day getting @Bob's Sportsbook addon to try and encourage the adults/parents to continue to come back and participate in discussions, banter etc. But we gotta make some money first that would allow us to invest in our website a little bit.
Thank you all for reading - we are trying the best we can and would appreciate any and all help/ideas/support etc.
