Don’t tell the county fans, but I enjoyed the spectacle of The Hundred - The English 100 ball “countdown cricket” competition - and so have many of the kids I coach.
So we decided to test out The Hundred as a coaching tool.
In the summer I ran a coaching week for 20 kids aged 7-12 where we played a modified version of countdown cricket as a basis of developing cricket skills and having a good time.
While I didn’t conduct a scientific analysis of motivation, satisfaction, inspiration and skill acquisition; I can anecdotally say we had a lot of fun, engagement levels were through the roof and players played well.
Here’s how we did it.
The Basics
Every session, we played at least one game of countdown cricket. The format was modified from The Hundred:
50 balls per innings (5 sets of 10).
Most runs win.
Out means out, but batsmen can return at the end to ensure all 50 balls are used.
Batsmen have to retire at after 10 balls faced (but can return).
Bowlers can bowl 10 balls (either as a set of 10 or two fives).
Either 5, 9 or 10 a side (depending on how many children at the camp)
Other laws of cricket applied broadly normally (it’s a kids week, we were generous with LBW and so on).
We used a soft windball. This was mainly because it was easier for swapping batsmen and innings. However, we also did not have access to a pitch, so used the outfield.
Skill Points
Players each had a “bingo card” of skills they could tick off once completed in the match. There were 30 skills across batting bowling and fielding such as:
Score a run in the V
Bowl someone out
Attempt a direct hit run out
As you can imagine, some are more difficult than others, but most kids could complete most of the skills with some practice and effort.
Once 5 skills were ticked off the players levelled up.
Level Up
The aim was to get through the levels and defeat the Boss level by the end of the camp. This is stealing from the Digital Video Games Approach blatantly, but to paraphrase a saying; good coaches borrow, great coaches steal!
When players levelled up, they get a randomly assigned “super power”, 1 per level. This is a limited time constraint that you can use in the game. I wrote 18 different super powers and printed them onto cards. The cards were handed out at the start of the match.
It was very exciting for everyone during the handing out ceremony!
Example powers are;
Every time the batter hits the ball they get a run (5 balls).
Bowler bowls 3 dots and the last 2 balls can’t be scored from.
Catch can be taken after first bounce (5 balls).
Once you burn your power, you can’t use it again, but you get another one in the next match.
The kids were highly motivated to go through the levels to get more powers. It seemed to work well that they kept getting new ones as a motivating factor to make the game interesting and set new challenges for the opposition.
Boss Challenge
Most players didn’t get through the five levels during the week, but it didn’t matter because they were all enjoying trying to do it. It wasn’t supposed to be “complete it or fail” as we all learn at different rates and have different motivations.
Two of the better kids did make it all the way through. They faced the boss challenge.
The boss challenge was individual but it was supposed to be extremely hard: One player was set the challenge of scoring 50 runs in 20 balls and taking 5 wickets in his 10 balls.
Neither did it but one got very close, missing out by just a couple of runs making it a spectacular finish to the week.
Using Countdown Cricket
My very biased conclusions at this one off experiment are:
Countdown cricket in itself is a useful format for game-based learning.
The powers ups are constraints that aid learning hugely for all players.
It’s a lot of fun to level up and use super powers, which is the main motivation for most of the kids
It would probably work for more performance-focused players but would need a bit of adjusting to speed up learning.