It's hard to believe its summer with wall-to-wall football on our screens at the moment but somewhere out there the cricket season is in full swing!

The County Inter-Cricket finals took place recently at Durham's picturesque Riverside ground. Inter cricket bridges the gap between soft-ball cricket, which is played by younger children and hard-ball cricket which is the normal game.

It is a great game to introduce both boys and girls to cricket, which is no longer played in schools in the traditional hard-ball fashion because children are still afraid of the ball. If young people aren't attracted to the game at this age then they will be lost forever and turn to other sports.

This initiative should help to prevent that. I was delighted to see that nearly 1,000 kids enjoyed inter-cricket before 200 of them battled it out in the finals. Honours went to Stanley School of Technology and Greencroft Comprehensive.

Juniors from Darlington RA had the opportunity to meet up with a young football star who is living their dream of making a successful career in the game when Middlesbrough's James Morrison presented the prizes at their special end of season night.

Perhaps Boro's manager Steve McClaren should look at leading scorer Jack Ridley who netted 41 goals in 21 games - a phenomenal feat in any standard of football. A special mention too for Tom Watson who scored seven goals in one game!

Local athletes are beginning their quest for qualification for the English Schools' Athletics Association Championships which are due to be held at Gateshead Stadium early next month.

Durham held its own championship to start the selection process for what is the biggest schools athletics event in the world and Northumberland followed suit.

A certain P Collins from Darlington gave a great performance in the high jump beating the national standard by 14cm. Up in Northumberland several records were broken including Kieran Flannery in the Senior Boys 400m hurdles and Kathryn Ellis in the Shot Putt. We might be hearing about these junior athletes feats at Commonwealth or Olympic Games in the future.

On the same theme I thought there was a misprint in last week's Local Heroes. A report on the Blaydon race said that almost 4,000 runners took part. That is an amazing number of athletes. Newton Aycliffe Athletics Club was certainly well represented with 22 runners competing and several personal bests recorded. Well done to Ray Todd the club's over 65 runner who finished in 42.57 minutes, probably a lot faster than I could manage!

We're on air on 96.6TFM with Soccer Saturday all through the summer between 12pm and 2pm for all the latest football news from the Tees Valley and, of course, TFM will have news from Portugal as Euro 2004 reaches the exciting knockout stages.