Keeping the Dream Alive

Jane Cable meets a very special couple who are helping Hampshire's young wicketkeepers.

Sometimes in writing about cricket you meet some very special people. I’ve met most of the Hampshire players; I’ve met Michael Vaughan, Alec Stewart, Nasser Hussain. I’ve even met Rod Bransgrove a couple of times. But today I met two people you won’t ever have heard of – their names are Phil and Gilly Williams – and they are doing something I believe is quite exceptional.

Phil and Gilly’s son Ben was a talented wicketkeeper who died of a rare heart condition aged just fourteen. In his memory they set up the Ben Williams Trust to provide funding to support children and young adults suffering from abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmias), and to support youth cricket projects, especially wicketkeeping. While the Trust has provided significant funding to create a role for a specialist nurse at the Royal Brompton Hospital, it has also supported winter coaching programmes for two young Surrey wicketkeepers.

And now it’s Hampshire’s turn as a £1,400 grant from the Trust will fund a programme which aims to standardise the approach to wicketkeeping development across the County, and provide specialist coaching for up to forty young keepers. The Hampshire Cricket Board proposal is an ambitious and cost effective one spearheaded by Hampshire’s specialist wicketkeeping coach Bobby Parks and covering both District and County levels across all age groups. Initially Bobby will work with the head coaches from each District and the County squads, and then visit each District and County squad in turn to run wicketkeeping clinics directly with the players involved.

Hampshire’s Performance Cricket Development Officer, Raj Maru, explains: “Wicketkeeping is a specialist position which has been much overlooked in the past, but the appointment of Bobby Parks as the County’s wicketkeeping coach and the funding from The Ben Williams Trust will enable us to standardise the manner in which keeping is coached, and give all cricketers within the District and County squads the opportunity to benefit from Bobby’s professional experience. Bobby running these sessions will mean that all our coaches and players would be coached in a similar fashion with no confusion when players move up through the age groups and (hopefully) to the County First XI.”

I had the opportunity to meet Phil and Gilly Williams when they visited The Rose Bowl to take a look around and to watch Bobby coaching Academy wicketkeeper Adam Rouse. I was keen to find out what had attracted them to the Hampshire proposal. “Cricket was Ben's passion in life and we want to celebrate this through the provision of opportunities for other children to benefit from specialist coaching. He communicated his enthusiasm of the game to younger children, often helping them to improve their game by passing on the skills that he had learned at coaching sessions.  We were attracted to the Hampshire Board proposal because it will involve children across a broad range of age groups, and we feel that the coaching of coaches is a particularly good way to make the most of our financial support.”

As we watched the coaching session, I asked Gilly how Ben had become interested in wicketkeeping. “He loved being in the middle of the action” she told me, “being involved in every ball.” Like many children who go on to play cricket themselves, Ben was brought up on the edge of a village cricket pitch (Grayswood on the Surrey Hampshire border) because his father played. However Phil gave up his own playing career when Ben started to get serious about the game, and his parents shared the task of taking him to all the training sessions and matches that playing age group cricket for Surrey entailed. Gilly, who unlike Phil had no cricketing background, threw endless balls for Ben in the family’s back garden and actually became a Level 1 coach, although she never coached her own son. She was fascinated to see Bobby using Hampshire’s new fielding machine to shoot highly targeted balls for Adam to catch. “It’s a bit different to the trampoline Ben practised with!” she laughed.

Established in 2006, the Ben Williams Trust has made a solid start in achieving its objectives. Ben’s nurse, at the Royal Brompton Hospital, has been funded for three years and has already made a significant impact on the lives of young arrhythmia sufferers and their families. “The idea of Ben's Nurse is to provide support to children and their families who are going through similar experiences to ourselves,” Phil explained. “Ben's Nurse helps children to come to terms with their conditions and make the best of their situation, as well as being available to address the concerns of parents and provide practical support.  As an example, she has intervened on at least three occasions to prevent children being excluded from school purely on the grounds of their condition.”

Phil recognises that continuing to raise funds in the current economic climate will be as tough for them as it will be for everyone else, and although the Trust is on a firm financial footing, more donations are always welcome. Further information on the Trust, and a link to its Just Giving page, can be found at www.benwilliamstrust.org.uk.

Cricketers, and cricket coaches, often overuse glib phrases about looking for the positives, but in this context the words have real meaning. Following the death of a child who was so talented, and so wrapped up in cricket, I suspect many parents would have turned their backs on the sport completely. And many more would have had enough to contend with, simply dealing with their own grief. But not Phil and Gilly Williams. They are quietly getting on with helping other children achieve what Ben never had the chance to. And they are keeping all of their dreams alive.

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