JUNIOR coaches have been honoured by the county’s cricketing OSCAs.

Acomb Cricket Club’s Simon Brown won the Maurice Young Award for services to coaching young people at the Yorkshire Cricket Board’s Outstanding Services to Cricket Awards (OSCAs) ceremony at Headingley.

Yapham’s David Booth was highly commended after being nominated in the same category.

Brown joined Acomb in 2008 with the aim of expanding the club’s youth section, which at the time only had an under-13s and U15s team, and giving his then six-year-old son somewhere to learn and play the game.

Six years on, the York club boasts four U9s teams including a girls team, plus two U11s sides to bridge the gap between the other age groups.

There are now more than 150 youngsters involved with the club and a number of those have gone on to perform at county level this season, with four girls and five boys featuring for North Yorkshire.

Away from his work with Acomb, Brown has also set-up a York-based coaching course called Love-Cricket for youngsters wanting to improve their skills over the winter.

Booth, meanwhile, has also helped to make tremendous strides since arriving at Yapham in 2000, when there was a solitary men’s side and no youth section.

Since 2001, he has introduced and expanded all areas of youth cricket, starting from U9s and going up to U17s.

His efforts in creating a development pathway have led to Yapham fielding a second men’s side in 2007.

That gave the club more opportunity to blood players from U15s and U17s in the senior game, with the seconds playing in the HPH York Vale League.

A number of the club’s current first team players have emerged from the youth section.

There were also OSCAs for Pickering’s David Cowton and John Powell, of Civil Service.

Cowton picked up the George Reah Award for special services to cricket, which rewards individuals for lifetime dedication to the game, and Powell received an award for services to scoring.