JAMES Carr, the new Emerald Headingley based Regional Director of Women’s Cricket for the North East and Yorkshire, says he is relishing the opportunity to fill the “blank canvas” which has been put in front of him.

Carr is the head of one of the eight new Regional Centres of Excellence brought in by the ECB to drive the women’s game forward in this country.

He started his new role - the women’s equivalent to Martyn Moxon - in late March, coinciding exactly with the UK going into nationwide lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Carr’s experience in cricket development and the female game is extensive.

Whisper it quietly, but he originates from the other side of the Pennines, with Bolton League club Golborne the one he calls home.

In terms of his coaching and development work within cricket, he has spent the best part of the last four years with the Southland Cricket Association in New Zealand and with Cricket Scotland in Edinburgh.

It has set him up perfectly to take on this new challenge of leading the advancement of women’s and girls cricket within Yorkshire and the North East.

“I’m hugely excited,” he said. “The women’s game is a massive growth area, and I’m all about growth and developing people.

“I want to put my time and energy into something where you can see a real return on that.

“The fact we’ve got this national goal to really transform women’s and girls cricket, the ECB’s vision ties in perfectly with my own.

“It’s awesome because it’s a blank canvas.

“It’s an area which perhaps doesn’t have the history and traditions the men’s game has, and it can use that to its advantage to progress through the modern world.”

With a blank canvas comes obvious potential, but it can also provide challenges, accepts Carr.

He continued: “Not everybody is great with change, but what we have to make sure is that we communicate and educate well within our current cricket fraternity.

“A lot of this has been inside led.

“The ECB has spent a good two or three years devising this plan, based on insights from who is playing the game, who is leading the game, who’s not coming to join the game for various reasons.

“You don’t just write this plan on the back of a cigarette packet and run with it.

“There’s so much time been put in, and I think it’s been made easier because of the amount of resource that’s been put into it - the messaging, the branding.

“But there will no doubt be some resistance, as there is with any change.

“I do think the fact there’s going to be 40 new professional playing contracts in England and the framework that goes with that, it’s going to make players all that more hungry. That’s exciting.

“There are certainly a lot more positives than negatives.”

As Carr alludes to, the plan is for each Centre of Excellence to offer five professional contracts to players below England contracted players, such as a Lauren Winfield for example.

Unfortunately, however, coronavirus has put those plans on hold for now, while playing schedules for 2020 are up in the air as well, with The Hundred officially postponed until 2021.

Still, there is plenty of work for Carr to do as he gets his teeth stuck into a job which adds to his varied cricketing journey.

He said: “I captained Golborne’s second team as a 20-year-old and the first-team as a 23-year-old. I played there for 15 years.

“I was the chairman at one point, the secretary, the treasurer. I’ve kind of done a bit of everything, which tends to be uncommon for somebody so young I guess. But I was passionate in seeing our club grow.

“I went to college and did a sports course and tried to apply what I’d learnt into building a junior section at the club. I was hungry to see that development in the club and in people.

“Fast forward 10 years and I saw a job in cricket development in New Zealand with the Southland Cricket Association and thought, ‘I’d like to work in sport full-time and broaden my horizons’. Thankfully I got it (September 2016).

“I was New Zealand Cricket Development Officer of the Year for 2018.

“My contract came to end (in September 2018) and then this development officer role came up with Cricket Scotland, working in Edinburgh. I took that and was there for less than 18 months before this job at Headingley came up.”