Changing the game for people living with special needs with BlowFly Cricket
August 16th, 2024
Meet BlowFly Cricket
Sport is a fantastic way to develop new skills, form friendships, and feel part of the community. BlowFly Cricket is committed to bridging the gap for people living with special needs and/or neurodiverse conditions.
We interviewed Founder Mark Rushton to learn more:
Introduction
Q: Tell us about your organisation
A: BlowFly Cricket is a warm, inviting, accepting, non-judgmental, caring, inclusive cricket club that caters for children, adolescents, and adults living with neurodiverse conditions, special needs and/or physical disabilities of all abilities, ages, genders, races, and cultures.
Q: What is your mission?
A: To enrich life by promoting BlowFly Cricket as an inclusive all-abilities sport for children and adults who live with special needs and/or neurodiverse conditions.
BlowFly Cricket is committed to enriching the lives of our members by developing unique skills programs, voluntary roles, future sports administration employment and other roles catering to the respective individual’s abilities and capabilities.
We aim to empower our members by actively encouraging them to take on achievable key roles to improve self-esteem, self-confidence, self-belief and self-worth to enable the individual to fulfil and/or maximise their potential. In time, this will flow on to benefit the broader community.
Q: What are your programs?
A: BlowFly Cricket has one centre that caters for children between the ages of 5 and 12 years, and operates three other centres which cater for children and adults, with the oldest player in his fifties.
These centres host fun-filled cricket sessions that are modified so every individual gets a fair go. The centres are completely run by the 150 volunteers and members who fulfil such roles as coaches, mentors, and friends.
BlowFly Cricket empowers and encourages individuals living with neurodiverse conditions and/or physical disabilities into a coaching position themselves, which opens up the world with many opportunities for employment and/or volunteering.
Journey
Q: What are some of the challenges you’ve been able to overcome?
A: On a personal level, the biggest challenge is accepting and living with my disability, including all of those invisible aspects which are largely unseen by most other people, and coping with seemingly endless spinal cord injury health problems…. there’s never a dull moment.
Before I became a paraplegic some 17 years ago, I believed the most valuable thing in life was good health. Living with a disability has certainly reinforced to me that those thoughts were indeed accurate.
On an organisational level, I feel the biggest challenge is being accepted as an important part of grassroots sports by the sporting community, both locally and further afield.
When BlowFly Cricket started 15 years ago, there was no other cricket club in NSW, maybe even Australia, which promoted the inclusive all-abilities model that we offer. Developing a new holistic concept for a great sport certainly created many interesting moments and I’m not only talking about on the playing field.
Now, it is incredibly rewarding and satisfying to see how the cricket community has embraced BlowFly Cricket and is now fully supportive of our community. Thank you all.
Volunteer Involvement
Q: How do you involve volunteers?
A: BlowFly Cricket’s volunteers provide a variety of functions including cooking, transporting, coaching and engaging with members before, during and after sessions.
Outside of the club’s cricket centres, volunteers run a number of fundraising initiatives, with one of our senior volunteers Dougal Graham travelling to several sports clubs each week to collect recyclable cans and bottles to donate to BlowFly Cricket’s Return and Earn campaign, with the earnings being donated back to the club.
Q: How do volunteers help you make a difference?
A: I would like to use quotes from a couple of our older volunteers who do so many amazing and wonderful things for our community:
I gain immense satisfaction and a sense of self-fulfilment from making a positive impact in helping other people. It continues to inspire me to do greater deeds when I witness the BlowFly Cricketers developing their confidence and improving self-esteem by learning new skills and taking on more and more key roles within our club. These new skills and roles are often outside the respective individual’s expectations – Dougal Graham, 89 year old volunteer
I am an Ambassador for BlowFly Cricket and I remain actively involved when I can, attending most weeks at the James Park Cricket Ground at Hornsby on Saturday afternoons where I join in the games, mingle with the players, chatting and laughing, resulting in an enjoyable afternoon.
It gives me great pleasure to see the improvement in all players and the social interactions as they gain their confidence…these are priceless moments – Errol Hyde, 80 year old volunteer and former Paralympian.
Q: What would you say to someone considering volunteering with your organisation?
A: Come along and give BlowFly Cricket a go, even if you don’t like cricket, as our community is not only about cricket. There are countless volunteer roles – whether you have an hour or so to spare every couple of months, or if you are available on a more frequent basis.
As a volunteer you will have a chance to enrich the quality of life for others and their respective families. How can you knock back such a wondrous opportunity? I can personally attest that volunteering with our club will also enrich your own quality of life.
For me, volunteering is the key ingredient to happiness, as it gives me the opportunity to have a positive impact in so many ways on others who are less fortunate than myself.
With this thought in mind, I consider myself to be perhaps a fortunate man who is truly blessed.
Learn more about BlowFly Cricket
Membership
The Centre for Volunteering is proud to support member organisations, like BlowFly Cricket, who are doing important work in the community.
There are many opportunities and resources offered by The Centre. Membership has far-reaching benefits and opportunities for not only the organisation itself, but also for their wonderful volunteers – BlowFly Cricket