Coming up

With the season now over the key dates to look out for are:

• Annual General Meetings (AGM’s) – coming up in June is our Juniors, Club and Seniors AGM’s
• Website updates – the website will be updated regularly over autumn / winter so keep a lookout for regular updates
• Club History – will be printed in May with the official launch at our AGM so keep a look out for this special publication
• Club Registration Day for 2017/18 – Sunday 30^th July 2017
• Clothing addition – this season we are introducing Club Hoodies and shorts. They will be trialled in the Girls and then rolled then out the following season after we get feedback on things like: comfort, popularity, design and so on.

2017 Community Sports Awards

We are delighted to confirm that CNSW has nominated our Club as ‘Community Cricket Club of the Year’. We now represent Cricket at the NSW Awards for all Community Sporting Clubs.

The NSW Community Sports Awards, presented by Sport NSW, recognise outstanding achievements and contributions to community sport in NSW – here . Sport NSW represents the interests of more than 80 NSW sporting organisations and 20 Industry bodies covering 670,200 adult volunteers.

Importantly, it is recognition for the 260+ volunteers in our Club and our culture of giving everyone a ‘fair go’.

There is a presentation at the NSW Parliament on 29 June and we have been invited where all Community Sports Award winners are invited and we are a candidate for broader NSW recognition.

Stay tuned for further updates after the presentations.

Annual General Meetings (AGM’s)

Our AGM’s are coming up that signals the start of our next season.

Juniors

Details are:

• When:              Tuesday 13 June
• Time:               7.30 pm
• Where:             WPH Sports Club

This is an important where the direction for next season is determined. The main agenda items are:

• Re-election of the Junior Executive
• Discuss planning for registrations and start of 2017/18 season.

Everyone is welcome to come along and have a say about how next season operates.

Club AGM

Details are:

• When:              Tuesday 27 June
• Time:               7.30 pm
• Where:             WPH Sports Club

This is the meeting where our Leadership Team is elected for the coming season. It is also where the main decisions are made on our priorities. The main agenda items are:

• Election of our Executive Leadership Team
• Season priorities

Seniors AGM

Immediately following the Club AGM is the Seniors AGM – same details as above.

Everyone is welcome to come along and it also gives a chance to catch-up with mates before the start of 2017/18.

Major Award Winners

Now that the dust has settled on the season, congratulations to our Major Award winners this year.

New Life Members

Life Membership is the highest award that can be bestowed on anyone involved with our Club. At the Seniors Presentation Night on 5 May, we inducted 2 new Life Members for long and distinguished service to our Club. This is extremely rare with only 22 Life Members inducted in 86 years. Congratulations to our new Life Members:

James Makin – our 21^st Life Member

James started playing Juniors for us in the mid-1980s and started in Seniors 1989/90. Apart from a distinguished record as a player and record breaking achievements as A1 Captain, James developed the A1 Grade Player numbering system where every player selected in A1 has a unique playing number in the order they have played going back 66 years.

He also evolved the Club Wisden from a primitive, highly manual intensive data base into an agile access data base that allows us to update playing records relatively easily and also get data cuts of many different records.

Bill Peterkin – our 22^nd Life Member

Bill played Juniors with us in the late 1980s and started Seniors in 1992/93 in all Grades from D2 to A1 Grade. Like James, Bill’s playing record is distinguished. Apart from his wonderful playing record, Bill has held many Administrative positions – Seniors Deputy Convenor between 2002 and 2006; Seniors Treasurer between 2009/10 and always helps out where there is a need.

Bill’s most significant achievement has been taking on the Kanga Director’s role since 2015/16 when Bill filled a gap in running Kanga with many of the administrative records and operational details unobtainable due to illness. What makes Bill’s contribution exceptional is that he has no children playing Kanga.

Club Service – President’s Award

Congratulations also to Julian Bish (Juniors Director) who was awarded the prestigious President’s Award for service to our Club. Julian has been Juniors Director since 2013 and has done an amazing job in running the Juniors and building a great Team.

Seniors

The Seniors Presentation Night was held on the 5^th May at Dural Country Club to bring the 2016/17 season to a close. Congratulations to our Major ward winners:

• Player of the Year – Dan Costigan
• Outstanding Prospect – Andy Meikle

Juniors

• John Coulthard Award (Junior Player of the Year) – Rowan Love
• Charles Booth Memorial Award (U13s) – Shaan Bakshi
• Ross Anderson Trophy (U11 Rising Star Award) – Harry Flower
• Volunteer of the Year Award:
  • U8s to U11s – Phil Carney
  • U12s to U16s – Rob Hanich
  • Girls – Michelle Boccalatte

Junior Girls

• Lisa Sthalekar Award (Player of the Year) – Lauren Kua (217 runs at average of 72.33)
• Volunteer of the Year – Michelle Boccalatte
• Arthur Souter Award – Christina Phillip

Note – Christina is our first Girl player to be awarded the Arthur Souter Award. This is awarded to those graduating players who have played every season since Kanga and is a great achievement.

Girl’s Team Awards

Batting

• U13s – Aliya Colbert
• U17 Blue – Auushka Dongre
• U17 Red – Jess Phillips
• U17 White – Lauren Kua

Bowling

• U13s – Maeve McAlister
• U17 Blue – Abigail Pereira
• U17 Red – Danielle Chivers (plus 5 wickets in an innings)
• U17 White – Varsha Krithivasan

Team Award

• U13s – Lauren Dean
• U17 Blue – Lily Campbell
• U17 Red – Ellen Hall
• U17 White – Amy Sherlock.

Season wrap

Kanga

The last leg of the season finished on Saturday 4^th March with our Presentation Day. Due to a wet weekend the Presentation was held in the Sports Club and some photos are loaded on the Gallery. This now brings the season to a close and a big thank you to all of our players, parents and supporters.

A special thanks to the Sports Club who kindly allowed us into the Club before opening hours and at short notice to help us out – really appreciated folks.

Junior Boys

Congratulations to our U13 Whites who made it through to the Grand Final. The result was:

U13

WPHC White 9/108 lost to Pennant Hills 131. Best batsman for us was Shaan Bakshi with 20 and best bowler was Arya Tyagi with 3/25.

 Seniors

We played in 5 Seniors Grand Finals and won 2 with a 1-run loss in A1 Grade. Congratulations to our Teams who achieved the following wins:

• Seniors Club Championship
• Premierships – B1 & C1
• Runners-up – A1, B2 7 C3
• T5th Grade T20 Premiership
• Joint Hayne Cup.

Headline achievements

There were many season highlights:

• 2 wins (B1 & C1) and 3 losses (A1, B2 & C3)
• Justin Paterson (A1) took 7/35 from 21 overs – the best bowling performance in an A Grade Grand Final for West Penno
• Daniel Fiedler (B1) and Andrew Fiedler (C1) are the first father / son Captain combination to win a Premiership WPHC – a Club first and possibly an Association record
• Andrew Fiedler became our 1^st Captain to win back-to-back Premierships in C1 Grade
• Justin Edwards taking a 5-wicket haul in B1 Grade.

Club Wisden

We are fortunate to have a statistical history that is 2^nd to none with James Makin doing a fabulous job in completing the 2016/17 season wrap. We don’t have this information for Juniors as in the decades before MyCricket, records were paper based with Team Managers keeping manual records.

With the rain/hail/heat-shortened year we didn’t threaten many records in terms season tallies, but here are the highlights:

Batting

• Andrew Morris was easily the top performer with 664 runs across C2, T20 5^th Grade & John Hayne Cup. Joel Herzog (487 in C2 & T20 4^th grade) and Ashane De Silva (487 in B1 & T20 2^nd grade) were the next best. Laurie Tuckerman’s all-time record will never be beaten – 1,361 in A1 in 1951/52
• The highest score for the year was Michael Roberston’s 150* in A2. That was the Club’s 39^th 150. Joel Herzog also scored 147. The highest score ever remains Ken Smith’s 225 in B1 in 1956/57
• Ashane De Silva had the best batting average – 54.1
• This year we had our first T20 century – 101* by Andrew Morris in 5^th grade. This beats Carl Madsen’s previous record of 94, set in the first T20 season in 2010/11
• Ross Anderson remains the leading run-scorer of all time, by a decent margin on 7,864. We have another 5 current players in the top 10 now – Andrew Fiedler in 3^rd, and you could throw a blanket over Kishore Rampersad, Eric Junkkari, Michael Banner and James Makin in 6^th to 9^th. Andrew Fiedler is the leading T20 run scorer on 345

Bowling

• Ishaan Singh took the most wickets this year with 38 in only 11 matches in D2-C3 & T20 5th grade. Dan Costigan was 2^nd with 33 in B1/A2 & T20 2^nd grade. Dan was also 7^th in the season’s top run scorers. Riley Miedler’s 32 wickets in A1 was 3^rd. The all-time best remains 80 by Peter Saunders in D2 back in 1983/84
• The best bowling figures were taking by the mercurial Simon Smyth – 8/20 in A2. These are the 13^th best bowling figures in the Club’s history. Ishaan Singh also took 8/40 in C3. Justin Paterson gets the “couldn’t have happened to a more deserving cricketer” award – picking up 7/35 in the A1 grand final after spending the week driving 100’s of kms to cover Berowra Oval for the A Grade Grand Final
• Justin Paterson (4^th) and Riley Miedler (7^th) remain in the top 10 bowling averages of all time (shhhh Michael Banner – this is for players over 100 wickets). Dan Costigan now has the best all-time average in T20s
• Dave Carey remains comfortably on top of the all-time wicket takers tree with 623. The highest current player is Eric Junkkari in 5^th on 452. Simon Smyth moved up to 7^th this season with 372. Matt Jobson remains the leading T20 wicket taker on 28.

Fielding

• Joel Behlevanas’s 25 dismissals in C2, B2, T20 3^rd Grade & the John Hayne Cup put him at the top of the last again this year (after 28 last year). Gautam Ayyar topped the catches tally with 21
• Nick Bennett moved up to 2^nd on the list of all-time dismissals with 169, now only 21 behind Dale Armstrong’s record.

Other

• Five new A-Grade numbers were issued to players selected for their A1 debut. Josh Matthias, Justin Paterson, Phil Wurth, Michael Robertson and Darshan Pandya are player numbers 310 to 314.

Elite performers

The following information is on our top fielding performances as at the end of the Semi Finals:

Top 3 fielders

1. Tarun Lath (C3) – 15 catches
2. Stanton Tam (C1) – 13
3. James McBrien (A2) – 11
4. Alex Robertson (A1 & A2) – 10
5. Brent Larkham (C2 Red) – 10

Top 5 wicket-keepers

1. Joel Behlevanas (C2 Blue) – 21 dismissals (15 catches +2 stumpings + 3 non-keeper)
2. Gautam Ayyar (C3) – 21 dismissals (17 catches + 4 as a non-keeper)
3. Nick Bennett (A1) – 15 dismissals (14 catches + 1 non keeper)
4. Michael Fiedler (B1) – 13 dismissals (11 catches + 2 non keeper)
5. Kyle Faber (B10 – 14 dismissals (11 catches + 3 non keeper).

Champion player points

Champion player points for the top 5 players are:

1. Andrew Morris (C2 Red) – 134.4 points
2. Dan Costigan (B1 & A2) – 105.1
3. Ashane de Silva (B1) – 95.2
4. Perry Waldron (C3) – 87.6
5. Joel Behlevanas (C2 Blue) – 84.5