New Zealand women have leading edge

Twenty years ago there was a Hawkes Bay schoolgirl who just wanted to play cricket.

It was summer and television sets in the corner of New Zealand lounges were beaming out live some of the most gripping images of New Zealand cricket the country had ever seen. New Zealand had taken on World Cup champions the West Indies in a test series and were beating them hands down (the Windies, meanwhile, were creating a sensation of their own, barging umpires and kicking down stumps). Ever quick to latch onto sporting winners and label them national heroes, all over the country public interest in the national cricket team suddenly mushroomed. Richard Hadlee, John Wright, Bruce Edgar, Jeremy Coney, Ewen Chatfield and Lance Cairns became entrenched household names and the sales of cricket bats zoomed skywards as boys - and girls - rushed out into the driveway, marked out the stumps on the garage door and did their best to imitate their world-beating idols.

It turned out to be a pretty frustrating time for our Hawkes Bay schoolgirl.

She was as keen as the next kid to have a go at taking catches and pummelling balls to the boundary, but the only person she could find to play with was a 13-year-old from the next street who fancied himself as a pretty devastating bowler, complete with Richard Hadlee wristbands. It was soon established that the girl could bat, interminably as it turned out, but this only spelled doom. The boy quickly tired of fetching the ball from the rosebush at deep cover and his reputation as the next Richard Hadlee was rapidly fading with his inability to get even a lousy blousy girl out. He pulled stumps, never to return.

The schoolgirl went to a single-sex school, Napier Girls' High.

Napier Girls' High didn't play cricket, even though Hawkes Bay, at that time, was considered one of the stronger provinces in the country in terms of the number of schoolgirl and women's club cricket teams it fielded. But those schools and clubs were all over Hastings way, a city to the south. The nearest club was Taradale, an outlying suburb to the southwest of Napier on the way to Hastings. The schoolgirl had the bad luck to live in Bay View, an isolated coastal town 10 minutes north of Napier. Unable to drive, unable to get a lift and with a public transport system that amounted to the Napier-Taupo bus whizzing through once a day, the club may as well have been on Jupiter.

The schoolgirl never did get to play cricket.

***

Twenty years on, how things have changed. Napier Girls High not only plays cricket now, but won the national schoolgirl trophy - the Yoplait Cup - in 1998/99 (beating a Timaru Girls' High team that had held the cup for two years by one run). What's more, they have depth down the grades, an endless stream of third and fourth formers putting their hands up to play. Some come from Bay View.

In fact, the growth of girls' cricket exploded nationwide around New Zealand in the 1990s. Figures from New Zealand Cricket censi (compiled annually from figures sent to NZC from its provincial and districts associations) show playing numbers swelled from just 3,500 registered schoolgirls in 1992 to 13,000 last summer - with significant flow-on effects for women's club cricket once girls leave school. In turn, the host nation of this year's CricInfo Women's World Cup has become an international role model for growing women's sport.

So what did New Zealand suddenly do right? After all, it's not as if women's cricket was a new phenomenon for the country: New Zealand had been playing women's test matches against England and Australia since 1934. And there was no shortage of cricketing heroes for girls, even if they did happen to be male.

The answer lies in a significant change in the way the sport was administered. A bit of a dry subject, admittedly, but do bear with me.

In 1992 cricket became the first major sport in New Zealand to integrate the men's and women's games under a single administrative roof. Until then, the old New Zealand Women's Cricket Association had been operated as an entirely separate entity from its male counterpart. Alas, it's long been the way of the world that men's sport simply gets more media coverage, more publicity, more sponsorship, bigger audiences and gates and (once you've rolled all that together) more money than women's sport. By joining the men under one big umbrella, suddenly the under-resourced women's game in New Zealand had the opportunity to share in the spoils.

Let's diverge for a moment to talk about the bad old days of women's cricket. For years self-financing was a necessary tradition when it came to female cricket teams travelling abroad - even if it were to represent their country. It began when 15 Englishwomen made that pioneering - and expensive - maiden journey to Australia and New Zealand in 1934, giving birth to women's test cricket. It was still going on when Debbie Hockley entered the test arena in 1979, at least to the end that test encounters were sporadic at best, and there just wasn't enough money left over to compensate players for time away from their jobs, even if they were representing their country. Hadlee was a professional cricketer; Hockley's best option was to juggle cricket with a physiotherapy career for the best part of two decades.

At a domestic level it was no better, with New Zealand's best cricketing women buying their own uniforms and digging into their pockets just to get to each year's national tournament. Unquestionably the lack of sponsorship, and hence administrative finances, constrained the amount of women's cricket played, both at domestic and international level. No wonder there was nothing left over to promote the game in provincial girls' schools....

Raising the game's profile had long been the theme of women's hopes, wishes and complaints about their half of the sport. With profile comes sponsors, with sponsors comes income and the ability to nourish and grow the sport from tip to toe. Amalgamation with men's cricket meant that a much larger system and pool of resources, both human and financial, was suddenly available to push and develop girls' and women's cricket in New Zealand.

The remodelled New Zealand Cricket Inc. made it a priority to establish a kind of nationwide equal opportunities environment in cricket, whereby the same energy that was poured into sustaining a national schoolboy cricket system would be provided for the girls. Ditto elite talent identifications systems and player development strategies, ditto making sure there were enough umpires and coaches to go round to sustain women's competitions nationally - not just in traditional hotbeds like Christchurch.

Let's fast forward now to New Zealand women's cricket today.

• It is standard for the national women's team to be provided with uniforms, tour expenses, resources and training facilities at the national cricket academy and for their games and profile to be promoted by New Zealand Cricket as part of its normal marketing activities and publications.
• The women's national team is sponsored by CLEAR Communications, as is the men's team. The sponsor further invests in raising the profile of the women's team and game.
• The secondary school girls' national competition is sponsored and established nationally, rather than being concentrated in private schools and pockets of the country like southern Hawkes Bay and Canterbury (consequently traditionally the birthplace of the majority of the national team). A record number of schools participated last summer.
• Last year Kate Pulford, Haidee Tiffen and Helen Watson became the first three female members of New Zealand Cricket's live-in, university-based BIL Cricket Academy.
• In 1998/99, the State Insurance Cup - a prolonged domestic competition for women - was introduced, again aligning a New Zealand Cricket sponsor with both men's and women's cricket. For the first time women cricketers could enjoy prolonged exposure to top cricket. For 60 previous summers, women had had to be content with a concentrated tournament format, their domestic season practically all over inside a week.
• Debbie Hockley has become the first woman in the world to become a professional cricketer, contracted by the Canterbury Cricket Association until the end of the CricInfo Women's World Cup and employed part-time by New Zealand Cricket Inc. to promote the women's game.
• Hockley also became the first woman to win the New Zealand Cricketer of the Year title - an award now open to both sexes - at the New Zealand Cricket Awards in 1998. Likewise, Emily Drumm - who had to begin her cricket playing in Auckland boys' teams - won the Auckland Cricketer of the Year title in 1994 and shared it in 1996 with Stephen Lynch.

In a nutshell, the only struggles New Zealand women cricketers have to worry about nowadays are the ones on the park.

Entirely as it should be, of course - yet sadly the women's game continues to be marginalised, financially and otherwise, in many other cricketing countries. But there is, at least, now a successful role model for those countries in the future, a proven recipe for integrating men's and women's cricket, the obvious spin-off being phenomenal growth in the women's sector that in turn drives more business and market share for the sport.

New Zealand Cricket is a role model not only for other cricketing nations, but other sports - viz the other major national sport in New Zealand.

History records that women have played rugby in New Zealand since 1891 - two years before New Zealand women even got the vote! But, left on the sidelines by the exclusively male New Zealand Rugby Football Union, its growth was so slow that the first women's provincial match was played only in the 1980s. Likewise, though a Women's Rugby World Cup was held in Wales in 1991, players were selected only on condition that they could pay $5000 to cover the cost of getting there. Consequently New Zealand suffered the ignominy of being beaten by the USA at rugby. The team became known as those who could pay, rather than those who could play.

But the NZRFU has since copied the national cricket model, and also strongly pushed its international rugby administration (the IRB) to include women's rugby in its administrative framework. Now marketed as the Black Ferns, the New Zealand national women's team won the first "official", IRB-sanctioned women's world cup in 1998 and last year New Zealand kicked off its first major, structured national provincial competition for women thanks to the NZRFU's funding and resources. The dramatic swell in women's playing numbers reflects the cricket model: from an estimated 1000 female rugby players nationwide in 1991, there are now that many alone just in Auckland schoolgirl rugby teams.

A country that likes to think of itself as a leader in egalitarian values is finally proving it on the sportsfields.

And what became of our schoolgirl? I have it on good authority that she is these days a cricket writer, currently engaged in writing a piece for the launch of the CricInfo Women's World Cup site. Apparently she moved to Auckland for university and once went along to the university club's indoor nets at Eden Park, where she played a splendid innings against the bowling machine in borrowed pads and gloves. The club captain was impressed; said she "looked like she'd been batting all her life".

Satisfied, she promptly retired.