Greenway Park Community Centre – the Big Day is here

The big day arrives next Sunday. The Greenway Park Community Centre is officially opened after years of planning.

This has been a huge effort from local sporting Groups – WPHCCC, AFL, Baseball, Little A’s and Rugby League. It would also not have happened without the drive from Julian Leeser, our local Federal Member.

At a cost of $3.6m we now have a Community Centre that will make Greenway Park, along with Cheltenham Oval, the best ground in the Association.

Our Junior and Senior Teams that play in the Semi Finals (13^th March) will be the first to use the new facilities.

Be part of our local history and come along to the official opening at 10.30 am next Sunday (28^th February). Enjoy a free light breakfast, wear your West Penno playing / training shirt and be part of history.

Well-earned break

While on Greenway Park, we are fortunate to have a Local Federal Member like Julian Leeser in our corner who is passionate about local Community sport and Cricket especially.

After getting Federal approval for the Greenway Park Community Centre he was back at Greenway Park during last week to present cricket equipment to local children. What better opportunity to have a bat along with Sreeni Pillamarri (C3 & Club Executive Member).

Next week we understand that Julian will be at Blowfly cricket along with his family and parents to enjoy the whole cricketing experience with young people doing great things in overcoming disability.

Club Wisden goes MyCricket

MyCricket went live in 2007/08. Before then, all playing stats were recorded manually on bits of paper called ‘D Sheets’ that are still found at the back of every scorebook. Typically these got lost and playing records went with them.

Thanks to the effort of mainly David Carey (1979/80 to 2000/01 and pictured far left) and lots of backup from your friendly editor, all records, except for a few years were recovered from 1946 – when we started up again after the War years break. The stats were then manually consolidated into a massive data base – referred to as our ‘Wisden’. This work took around 5 years of hard slog and over 1,000 hours of combined effort.

The result is that we are likely the only Community Club in NSW with extensive records going back so far.

Our ‘Club Wisden’ is the Club Bible of all stats going back to when we restarted. Even now, James Makin spends many hours every season updating the records from MyCricket so that we can have the best performance records that any long-term Club offers.

The problem is that MyCricket doesn’t show any records pre-2007/08. We have lots of players who have scored massive runs, taken truckloads of wickets and have fielding records that can only be found by sourcing multiple records.

All this is soon to change with James Makin well advanced in moving all the Wisden records to MyCricket – a massive task and covered below.

To complete the story, in this picture, taken in May 1999 are 5 Club Life Members:

Dave Carey, Jim Fuggle, Barry McDonald, Ross A, Jon Burns

While on MyCricket

It all sounds pretty easy but get a load of the effort that James Makin (A1), as an example, is putting in so that our Club playing records are all on MyCricket as the single point of reference.

After recent systems enhancements, MyCricket can retain pre-2007 playing records. The challenge is getting them onto the system. How about this for effort. James has worked with MyCricket over the last few months to open up the data bases for pre-2007 stats:

• There are 1,661 players pre-2007
• This covers 305 combinations of season and Grade going back to 1946. To quote James, who is an Actuary (one of those really smart people) by profession:

“I’ve probably spent about 5-6 hours so far figuring out what to do, and cleaning/formatting the data for upload. In the meantime MyCricket have set up each of those seasons/grades for us individually and enabled them for summary data rather than individual scores. They reckoned this would take 13 hours.”

• Next steps is to manually create all 1,661 players in MyCricket and then upload each of the 305 seasons/grades one by one.

This is another massive effort but to quote James again, in a classic understatement:

“…a few hours in that unfortunately, but I’ll keep chipping away at it 😊”

So…pretty soon all the records of those players with us since before 2007 will be available online.

Reelin in the years

First up, our theme music for this section – here

This week who else but the amazing Gav Taylor (A1 & Player #288). Gav made his debut in 2004/05 (B1 as a 13 year old). He played B1 until 2007/08 and has played A1 ever since – with the odd season off to recover from injury and run his business – Veri Shades here .

In the photo, taken on 17^th September 2011, Gav (pictured 2^nd left) is pictured along with some other amazing players in our History:

• Matt Jobson (left) – our youngest ever Premiership winning Captain (A2 Grade as a 20 year old)
• Gav – the Man himself
• Daniel Anderson (3rd left) – youngest A1 Premiership winner (16 years)
• Nick Bennett – record holder for most w/k dismissals (186 w/k dismissals)

Gav is the youngest player in our 90 year history to be selected in A1 at just 15 years, 3 months & 3 days old. He pipped Daniel Anderson (15 years 4 months and 18 days) & Daniel Ward (15 years and 6 months old.

Gav has scored 3,572 runs @ 26.1 and is the 26^th highest run scorer in the Club at just 28 years of age! He has also taken 41 wickets.

We have many great players but if Gav hangs around he could break all sorts of records – despite the circulating rumours of retirement.

Finally, if you neeed the very best in Shades then make sure Gav’s company, Veri Shades is top of the list.

Brothers in Arms

What better way to introduce this story than with a Dire Straits classic – here

We have a long history of brothers playing together and doing well. The Hando’s in B2 are the best known. After the weekend, another set of brothers have made their mark – the Fullerton’s in C4.

On the weekend. Luke (U17) 60 & Alistair (pictured) 63* etched their names in the history books with an Association & Club record, C4 Grade 4^th wicket partnership of 115. This beat the previous best Association record of 106 set back in 2015/16.

C4 Grade started in 2014/15 so while it lacks the long history of some other Grades that goes back to 1920 this is a wonderful performance and the only Association batting record we hold that is held by brothers.

To quote Skipper Rob Hanich, from his Match Report:

“Batting started very positively, but then 3 quick wickets and we were staring at a low total. But this just brought the fantastic, fabulous Fullerton boys together.

 Time to sit back and watch a true batting masterclass. Both started slowly, but were just getting their eyes in. Then hell broke loose. They put on 98 runs in the 13 overs after the drinks break, until Luke (exhausted) finally lost his wicket. What a wonderful partnership of 115 in total that set up our whole innings. Luke got 60 runs and Al ended 63 no. Some late hitting saw our total get to 6/159 before our 35 overs were up.”

Well done boys.

Academy wraps up another successful season

In another ground-breaker, West Penno is the only Club in the Association along with only a handful of Clubs in NSW, to offer an Academy. Run over 10 weeks at a ridiculous cost of $200 we completed our 3^rd season.

This season we had a record year with 34 participants. The quality has been amazing and the feedback enthusiastic. How about this:

• 1 on 1 coaching opportunities with Premier 1^st Grade players including: batting from Dave Lowery and Axel Cahlin (Northern District); bowling from Arvin (Gordon) and fielding/wicket keeping by 1st grade keeper Sammy McMahon (Wests)

Add to this, free Clinics provided to all Junior Teams by our Coaching team plus individual coaching, when requested, watch this spot for even more amazing talent filtering through to the Seniors in the next couple of years.