Warwickshire to adopt Rooney Rule as part of first team coach recruitment process

Warwickshire are searching for a new head coach after Jim Troughton, whose association as player and then coach with the club spanned three decades, was relieved of his duties following a review into the 2020 season

Warwickshire are to adopt the Rooney Rule as part of their search for a new first team coach in an effort to encourage applications from suitably qualified BAME candidates, the county has revealed.

Warwickshire are searching for a new head coach after Jim Troughton, whose association as player and then coach with the club spanned three decades, left the club following a review into the 2020 season.

This will be the first time that a first-class county has adopted these principles, with the Rooney Rule originating the National Football League and named after former Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney, who also chaired the NFL’s diversity committee.

The Rooney Rule dictates that sporting authorities – in this case, Warwickshire – must interview a BAME applicant when recruiting for senior coaching positions.

The county’s chief executive, Stuart Cain, said: “There shouldn’t be a barrier in the mind of anybody with the right experience who wants to apply for this job.  So, we think it’s right to adopt the principle of the Rooney Rule in the same way as many of the world’s leading sports organisations have.

“Birmingham is one of the UK’s, if not Europe’s, most diverse cities and we have to reflect this when holding a mirror up to the club and how we operate at every level, from the board down.”

Warwickshire director of cricket Paul Farbrace added: “Everyone at the club is excited by the opportunity to bring fresh perspectives and ideas to Edgbaston as well as a proven ability to create trophy-winning Warwickshire teams that play exciting, positive cricket.

“That experience could have come from developing winning teams anywhere in the world at a domestic or international level. Due to Warwickshire CCC’s reputation within world cricket, we are confident that there will be interest from a number of high calibre candidates.”

^{The ACE Programme is to launch in Birmingham in 2021}

The news that Warwickshire are to adopt the Rooney Rule comes in the week after it was announced that Birmingham was to become the second city to launch the ACE (African-Caribbean Engagement) Programme, set up initially in association with Surrey, with Ebony Rainford-Brent as its driving force.

The scheme was initially set up in January to increase cricketing opportunities for members of the African-Caribbean community, seeking to address a 75 per cent decline in participation. Only three full-time head coaches in the history of county cricket have been from an African-Caribbean background.

Sport England funding and an ECB grant have allowed the initiative to expand, moving into Birmingham, with Warwickshire partnering with ACE to take on the running of the project.

Cain added: “If you look at the black community, cricket in Birmingham 15 or 20 years ago in areas like Handsworth was a really vibrant sport with really vibrant clubs.

“It wasn’t just about the cricket; it was about the social side as well – a place where people met and a place where people helped each other and it was really part of the social scene. That has fallen away over recent years. It’s a really important community.

“It was really important to say that we should raise the bar in how we work with the black and Afro-Caribbean communities to sit alongside the work we’re doing with other communities to represent that broad diversity across the city and make sure that we do try to get to that objective of holding that mirror up and making sure that we represent everyone.”

Despite the diverse nature of Birmingham, Warwickshire had no coaches or players of BAME backgrounds on their senior staff last season, though Cain added that this situation is in the process of improving.

He stated that around 60 per cent of academy age-group squads were now made up of players from South Asian backgrounds, with the club reaping the benefits of significant work in those communities – the kind of tangible improvements that the ACE Programme hopes to achieve.