Roland Butcher Training Bat No. 1

The creation of The Roland Butcher Cricket Training Bats, was a result of a 20-year professional cricket playing career. Throughout my First Class and International playing career, I had a technical problem with the balls that came back into me as a right handed batsman. This was a problem I was unable to solve during my playing career. It weighed heavily on my mind during and after my playing career. Following my retirement, I set out to design and produce a cricket training bat that would correct the problem I had in my playing days in order to assist future batsmen develop the batting skills required for elite performances.

The first bat I designed was for batsmen to train and master the in swinging delivery and off spin delivery coming in to the right handed batsman. This bat was then put through a long and rigorous testing phase, before I was satisfied with its performance and results. After successful trials of this bat, it occurred to me that the opposite is also true for players who have difficulty playing the ball the moves or spin away from the right handed batsman. At this point I designed another bat, for batsmen to train and master the away swinging delivery and leg spinning delivery going away from the right handed batsman. The third training bat was designed for mastery of playing spin bowling and fast bowling.

During this time, I was a High Performance Coach with the International Cricket Council (ICC) under ICC High Performance Head Coach Bob Woolmer, the former England player and South Africa and Pakistan Head Coach. Bob Woolmer was the most innovated, technical, scientific and technology driven coach in world cricket. Following discussions with Bob Woolmer about the cricket coaching bats that I had designed, he advised me to have the bats scientifically tested at Loughborough University.
Loughborough University is one of the most advanced University in Science and Technology in the area of Sport. I registered the three designs in the UK in 2002. Later in 2002 the three bats went to Wolfson School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Loughborough University for scientific study and testing.

In May 2004 Loughborough University produced a Thesis on the Cricket Training Bats. The Thesis confirmed scientifically that all the bats worked and produced the results that I had anticipated. The research was done with the England Academy players over a 2-year period and confirmed that the bats improved the performances of the batsmen significantly. The results also confirmed that the training bats also improved the accuracy of the bowlers significantly. This was a surprise to me, because all along I was only looking at the bats from a batting perspective