Cricket captain Alyssa Healy is one of the world’s most destructive batters. And that’s saying something, considering that cricket is played in over one-hundred countries.
With a viewership of about 2.5 billion people, cricket is the second most popular sport after football.
While women started playing international cricket matches in the 1930s, it’s taken several decades for the infrastructure and investment in the sport to catch up. Thankfully, women’s cricket teams are rapidly rising up the ranks in today’s game.
“I was always a really sporty kid, so I played a lot of it. But I think the difference is you didn’t see a lot of it. I mean, all the heroes I looked up to growing up were all men doing what I was doing in whatever sport I played,” says Healy.
“So the fact that you can see it now on TV, young girls can see a future. I can see a pathway in particular to elite sport.”
“I think that’s been the biggest shift that’s probably led to professionalism and added opportunities for young girls to get into sport. But I think the fact that they can see their heroes running around in the park, on TV in particular, I think that’s what has made the biggest move.”
Cricket has long been a very male-dominated sport, and growing up, Healy was the only girl at her school playing cricket with the boys.
“I remember my nickname at school was Butch because I was the only girl that played sport and I went to a coed school,” she says, adding that while the nickname hadn’t been offensive to her at the time, she looks back and realises that things have changed a lot.
“By now, if you’re not playing sport, if you’re not involved, you’d be the outlier,” she says. “The fact that young girls are aspiring to [play cricket] and people can see it more still blows my mind everyday.”
Sharing this insider’s look into the growth of women in cricket, Healy speaks to Dinushi Dias on today’s episode of The New Rules, a Women’s Agenda podcast taking you behind the scenes of the rise of women’s sport.
There are now over 5000 all-girls cricket teams around the country, according to Cricket Australia. And looking at expanding the sport over the next decade, the organisation has some ambitious plans.
“They’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes about how they can make the organisation, and the sport as a whole, more gender equal, which has been really cool,” Healy says about Cricket Australia.
“I’ve been a part of a lot of the different studies that they’ve been doing, looking at how they can be better, how they can improve certain areas.”
Healy says that oftentimes there’s a misconception from people the problem of gender inequality in cricket can be solved by simply “throwing money at the problem”, but she believes the solution requires a more nuanced approach.
“It’s about culture, and it’s about communication and making everybody feel valued within the organisation, and I think that’s what cricket has really got right over the years,” she says.
“We’ve invested money in great leadership programs, high performance resourcing and enabled the sport to grow organically from below. Whereas I think sometimes if you just throw money at the top, then the rest of it gets left alone and you don’t have the depth and the structures in place to continue to sustain that for a long period of time.”
Historic milestones have already been achieved through this approach. Since Cricket Australia developed a gender strategy, Victoria University says the number of cricket associations providing all-girl competitions has grown 700 per cent.
Community level women’s teams have risen from 200 to 750. And Cricket Australia has signed a landmark pay equity deal with the women’s team as well.
“There’s just a mutual respect now, in particular across the world, that the women are doing exactly what we’re doing, and it’s their time,” Healy says.
“The professionalism of each sport in particular continues to grow, and I think that’s only going to create more respect.”
To hear more of the conversation with Alyssa Healy, check out the sixth episode of Women’s Agenda’s The New Rules podcast. You can find it below, or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.