THE winners of the People’s Choice honour at the Grassroots Awards were recognised after spending a year ‘punching above their weight’.

Burnley and District U13s cricket team finished the season with the prestigious Lancashire Cricket Board’s Hacking Club - a victory made all the more remarkable for the fact that they can pick from only two teams, Burnley and Lowerhouse.

They became the first Burnley side to win the trophy in 34 years by beating a Bolton team who had 10 clubs to choose from in the final.

Stan Heaton, chairman of Burnley and District cricket, said: “It was a very proud moment and I was very pleased for the youngsters.

“We’re going to have another presentation for them so they can all share in the success, it will be nice to do something over a pizza or a burger that is for everyone.

“We’re going to have some miniature replicas of the trophy made as well so we can keep one at Lowerhouse and one at Burnley.

“We can only pick from two teams but sometimes we are playing districts that can choose players from double figures of clubs, so we are always punching above our weight.

“We’d been the joint winners before but we’d never won it outright, so it was a special year.”

It was an especially enjoyable moment for Heaton, who won the People’s Choice award himself in 2011 for his work in setting up the coaching system at Lowerhouse Cricket Club.

“I’ve won this award myself previously so that struck a happy note for me,” he said.

“It’s a tremendous thing that the Lancashire Telegraph do. The support and coverage of grass roots sport is tremendous and the awards are the icing on the cake.”

Heaton will now turn his attentions towards next year’s district sides, although he expecting things to be a little trickier in 2015, before another charge towards honours in 2016.

“Burnley are doing great work with their youngsters and we’re doing the best we can,” he said. “We used 19 players and we produced about half each and we’ve had a really good year for talented players.

“It goes in two-year cycles, so our good u-11s will be a year younger than the u-13s, and the u-13s from this year will now be a year younger than the u-15s, so it might be difficult to repeat this task, but we will give it a good go.”