Andy O’Connor came through the junior system at Northants playing for both the Academy and Second XI. The remainder of his 25-year playing career consisted of playing in the Birmingham League, and predominantly the Northamptonshire Premier League, also representing the county in the Northants Amateur League XI.
Whilst playing local league cricket, Andy pursued a 25-year career in Civil Engineering, working as a Design Engineer for Civil Engineering Consultants, before making the switch to cricket coaching.
Andy is an ECB Level 3 coach (2006) and is also a member of the Northamptonshire ECB Coach Education team. He is part of the junior coaching setup at Northants, having coached most age groups, both boys and girls. He is currently Coach of the new U18s boy’s squad, having coached the u17s Boys team during their ECB National Championship 3 day and 1 day cup winning seasons of 2017 and 2019. Andy was head coach of the Northants Women’s squad, the “Steelettos”, for 8 seasons, and also headed up the Northants Girls Emerging Players Programme (EPP), whilst also working on the boys Academy and EPP Coaching teams. He was also head coach at the Moulton College Cricket Academy for 5 years, one of the students being Olly Stone (Northants, Warwickshire, & England); with others moving on to MCCU cricket.
He has also attended and organised numerous school and academy tours around the world, and heads up regular 1:2:1 and group coaching camps, for both junior and adult cricketers.
Andy has been a coach at Stowe School for the past Eleven years, seeing some cricketer’s progress to MCCU and County 2nd XI cricket and now some coached have made it to County 1st teams across the country. In 2010 Andy was voted National Chance to Shine MCC Spirit of Cricket Coach of the Year.
With author James Knott, Andy has now had 3 cricket books for players and coaches published by Polaris Publishing.