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A cricket bat's not just any cricket bat — not when it has been handcrafted and tailor-made for the person wielding it.
Key points:
- Participation in cricket is on the decline across Australia, and it is particularly felt at country clubs
- Players often have to travel great distances to play
- The Hamilton-based College Cricket Club has expanded to include women's cricket and shorter format games to entice new players
According to Lachlan Fisher, who has made countless bats over more than three decades, every bat crafted from a piece of willow has its own individual personality.
Mr Fisher said he could immediately tell a good bat just by how it felt.
"You can feel that it's light and it picks up well," he said.
"There's no resistance in your hands."
Junior cricket numbers on the decline
Originally operating from a workshop in Melbourne's inner-west, Mr Fisher once delivered bats to serious club cricketers and keen youngsters alike.
But those days are in the past — he said the writing was on the wall years ago, with even metro clubs losing teams, and it is even worse in country areas.
Other weekend sports, like soccer, were more attractive to time-poor families, and fewer young people took up the bat and ball.
"Our orders have gone down simply because of participation in cricket," Mr Fisher said.
But he has persisted nonetheless.
Although no longer a fixture of the Melbourne cricket scene, he continued to make bats for discerning clientele from his workshop in Lismore in western Victoria.
"I've just clung onto the business as a labour of love," Mr Fisher said.
Fourteen-hour day every Saturday
It has been a love of the game that has kept cricket afloat in clubs across the country.
Every Saturday 34-year-old Chris Lee has woken early to hit the road.
He has clocked up hundreds of kilometres every weekend on the five-hour round trip to don the creams for Laanecoorie Dunolly Cricket Club, in western Victoria, from his home in Yarraville in Melbourne's west.
"I'm getting up at 7am and getting off the ground at 6–6:30pm, then you've got a debrief with the captain," Mr Lee said.
"Then you've got to turn the keys over and head back on the highway, so you're not getting back 'til 9:30–10pm.
"You're looking at a good 14-hour day of driving and exerting yourself."
It has become a way of life for the keen paceman, who began playing cricket aged eight.
But the game is not without its sacrifices.
"You're giving up on your family, your friends, your partner — they're not going to see you — and potentially you're giving up a day of work, depending on what industry you work in," he said.
Dunolly, a town with fewer than 900 people, relied on people like Mr Lee to fill out the club's playing roster.
The Laanecoorie Dunolly Cricket Club was not the only one to look outside the immediate region to recruit new players.
Mr Lee said players had been called to play from Ballarat, Melbourne and even the West Indies to beef up teams in country Victoria.
The battle for time
It has been a similar story across the country — the struggle to keep junior players around long enough to play for the "first eleven" amid a changing demographic in regional and rural Australia.
"There's real challenges once you get out of the metro regions in terms of the number of teams required to sustain a competition," said Kieran McMillan, head of clubs, competitions and diversity at Cricket Australia.
"I think all cricket clubs, wherever they are, are challenged with retaining youth."
He pointed to the popularity of individual fitness pursuits like F45 that has spelled a decline organised sport and said shorter games with smaller boundary sizes and fewer players are "the way of the future."
Mr McMillan said Cricket Australia had seen a slight decline in the number of registered club players over the last three years, but that the organisation was "committed to reversing that gradual decline."
How this club turned it around
Just a few years ago, College Cricket Club secretary, Lachy Patterson, conceded it was a struggle for the Hamilton-based club to put teams on the field.
The club was battling for junior numbers, faced population decline in the town and greater time constraints for players and their families as store opening hours changed.
"Once upon a time, after midday here on a Saturday and certainly … on a Sunday — there wasn't a shop open," he said.
"But now you can walk into a shop all day Saturday, and for a fair chunk of Sunday, so people working at those shops has taken away available players."
Through the inclusion of women's cricket and playing shorter-format games to entice younger players, the club in Hamilton now has a healthy future — but it has not been an easy road.
"It hasn't just turned around because of good luck, it's turned around because of some really hard work," Mr Patterson said.
"It certainly makes it more attractive for a family to be able to come if the girls in the family don't have to just sit in the car and do nothing for a few hours — they can actually be involved."
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