North Middlesex Cricket Club Academy are raising money for Shatila School and Cricket Club which is based in Lebanon which provides coaching for Syrian Refugees.
The cricket club is run by NMCC member Richard Verity who works for the charity Alsama, which provides life changing support for the Syrian refugees in Lebanon.
More than 35 per cent of the Syrian refugee children in Lebanon aged five to 18 are forced into child labour. Cricket provides a welcome distraction for them and many parents say they are seeing positive changes in their children.
The North Middlesex Cricket Club Academy are aiming to raise £4,000 for Shatila school and cricket club, with the academy members running or cycling as a collective the total distance from NMCC to Shatila CC, which is 4,510 km.
The money is going towards a software called Ludimos, which is the worlds first cricket coaching platform, connecting players and coaches from all over the world and is extremely useful in providing coaching for those who are unable to reach it, 60 children in the club will have the opportunity to access it.
First-team captain and club director James Parslow said: “We’ve got a really good bunch of lads in our academy that have been training together for quite a long time.
“Last year they had a massive year, making lots of finals, and we were doing lots of stuff in the winter, coaching them, and doing some strengthening and conditioning but obviously we’ve had to stop.
“The boys wanted to do something to keep in touch as well as keeping fit and active, and to obviously give back to an amazing cause, and we’re obviously privileged to live in London and it’s amazing to give back to them.
“The beauty of this was all down to the kids, we didn’t push for it, but myself and Sanjay Suri are also running the distance so there is 13 of us.
“We just said it would be nice to be able to do something like some fundraising and the kids basically came up with this idea.
“All I did was set up a Zoom meeting to see what distance we would run and what charity, but they’d already done that, and set up a website.
“It shows you how much these kids really mean business and what we’re trying to do is run from our cricket club to Shatila Cricket Club.
“We’re going to do that over 15 weeks which lands us on May 8, which is when the cricket club starts.
“We worked out it’s about 280km a week, which is about just over 20km per person.”
Visit https://www.givey.com/northmiddlesexacademyfundraiser to donate to the cause.
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