How mentoring can make a difference in rapidly changing world of women’s cricket
Changing
rooms can be lonely places. When Isa Guha started playing cricket she was the
only girl in an all-boys team and when she was only a little older, the only
girl in an all-women’s one. A lot of the women she played with and against in
her 10 years of international cricket had similar stories, so do a lot of the
women she watches and talks about now, a decade later, in her second career as
a presenter and commentator.
“Being the only girl in a
team, that’s still quite common,” Guha says. “It probably helped my cricket,
because I was spending so much time out of my comfort zone, but it still came
with the same feelings of isolation.”
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Last
year, Guha launched a non-profit mentoring organisation, Take Her Lead, working in women’s cricket. Before the
launch, they commissioned a survey of 300 young female cricketers about their
experiences. “I know we all feel we have a pretty good idea of what’s going on,
but there’s nothing like speaking to people who are coming into the game,” Guha
says, “and we were shocked that experiences they were talking about were the
same experiences our mentors had had when they were growing up. It made me
realise the sport hasn’t moved forward as much as we think it has.”
They told stories about
being uncomfortable wearing whites, because of their periods, but feeling
unable to talk to any of their teammates and coaches about it. They spoke, too,
about the sense they needed to be twice as good as the boys they were playing
with, to prove they deserved their place, and the sense of isolation, of having
no one to talk to about it. That could be attributed to so female coaches
because there are so few female coaches.
“There were times when I
was 12 or 13 when I wanted to quit the game because I felt isolated,” Guha
says. In her case, that loneliness wasn’t exacerbated because there were so few
British Asian girls playing the game but she can understand how that may be the
case for others.
Guha was the first woman with a British South Asian background to play for England and 12 years after her retirement she is still one of only two – the other being Sonia Odedra – to have played for England.
Isa Guha in action for
England in 2011. Photograph:
Reuters/Alamy
“The figure we keep
hearing is 30% of the playing population in England is from a South Asian
background, but you have to separate men’s and women’s cricket,” she says. The
research done by Take Her Lead is designed to help fix that. “The figure is
much smaller on the women’s side,” she says, and the upshot is that “five
players from minority backgrounds have played for England women, so you have to
ask ‘Why?’”
Guha has been doing a lot
of thinking about that. “In the last few years I’ve been doing a lot of
reflecting on why I was able to succeed when there was such a lack of
representation at the England level,” she says. “Asking myself why I was able
to get through the system and I realised it was because of the support I had,
especially from my mother. It wasn’t just her, but she gave me the confidence
and the belief to be able to do what I did.”
Take
Her Lead is, in part, a tribute to her mother, Roma, who died in 2019, and an
effort to provide the same sort of support she gave her children to girls who don’t
have it in their own lives already. Their first initiative, Got Your Back,
launched on Tuesday.
“I heard those young
girls’ experiences and thought: ‘Yeah, I definitely felt that when I was
younger, but was I supported to come through it?’ Well, maybe those girls
aren’t getting that and that’s why we’re losing them from the game. Got Your
Back is meant to raise awareness and understanding about what everyone in the game
can do to be better at encouraging women and girls to get involved.”
Beyond that, Take Her
Lead are planning bigger projects, in collaboration with Ebony Rainford-Brent’s
ACE programme, The Lord’s Taverners and the MCC Foundation.
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These
are strange times for women’s cricket. The game is changing fast. Guha has just
been in South Africa, working on the women’s T20 World Cup. “Last time I was
here, when we were on tour in 2011, we would have a hundred people turning up
to the ground to watch.” Twelve years later, almost 13,000
came to watch the final. “To see a packed house, and all the support
for the team from the local community, filled me with so much pride. It was
very emotional.”
The
first Women’s Premier
League begins on Saturday. It wasn’t so long ago that England
women players had to pay for their own kit – now the best of them are picking
up six-figure contracts in the franchise leagues. The pace of change creates
its own stresses, as boards try to navigate the new landscape of the game and
players reckon with the life-changing sums of money on offer, along with the
increased scrutiny that comes with all the exposure.
“We absolutely see a need
to manage that transition,” says Guha. The game is being stretched, and she
adds: “We’re really conscious there doesn’t become too much of a gap to entry
level.”
At the
same time, the report conducted by the Independent Commission into Equity
in Cricket is
looming over the English game. Guha believes it is going to “uncover a lot of
hard truths”, but she also sees it as an opportunity to make the game better,
and bigger. “You can only move forwards if you know where you’re coming from.”
This
article was amended on 3 March 2023. An earlier version said that Isa Guha was
the only woman with a British South Asian background to have played for
England; in fact Sonia Odedra has also done this since Guha retired.
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Source of Info - https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/mar/02/how-mentoring-can-make-a-difference-in-rapidly-changing-world-of-womens-cricket
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