Poulton to take over CA coaching role from Fitzpatrick

Former Australian batsman Leah Poulton has been appointed the High Performance Coach for Cricket Australia's Female Program to oversee the development of the country's up-and-coming female cricketers. She will take over from former Australia fast bowler and coach Cathryn Fitzpatrick in July.

Poulton, 33, will also oversee the Australia A women's squad, the Under-15 and Under-18 programmes, and the inaugural female National Performance Squad. She said the growth of the women's game has led to the demand of additional coaching resources at a youth level.

"Cathryn Fitzpatrick was in this role before me on a part-time basis and I think it was inevitable that it would turn full-time, because it is such an important space and there are so many great things happening in the female pathway," Poulton said. "Australia's had such a great history and that doesn't happen by accident, we have to put a lot of work into our pathway to help cultivate those emerging players. It's not a case of creating them, the talent is there and it's about creating the right environments where they can thrive."

Following her retirement at the end of the 2014-15 season, Poulton made her foray into coaching as Cricket NSW Female Pathway Manager before she stepped into the role of assistant coach with the NSW Breakers and the Sydney Thunder in the Women's BBL. Recently, she returned from a study trip to the USA with fellow state and WBBL coaches Julia Price, Lisa Keightley and Shelley Nitschke and said she was looking forward to passing on some of her learnings.

"We went over there and explored a lot of high performance environments, looking at the way they did things. It's always great to learn from different areas, there's lots of synergies between sport and business," she said. "It was excellent to hear their take on things and to see if they're doing things a little bit differently and what we can learn from them."

Poulton captained the Australia Under-19 side before featuring in two Tests, 48 ODIs and 40 T20Is, and played more than 100 domestic matches for New South Wales.