This summer, 88 of us from Steventon CC – a village club in south Oxfordshire – will head to the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup Final at Lord’s. The group includes all our women’s players, girls’ players, and a lot of the coaches, scorers, umpires, family members, and spectators that make things happen for us. It’s a real family trip.
It’s a day we’re all looking forward to, and it’s also a chance for us to celebrate just how far women’s and girls’ cricket has come at Steventon.
Today, we run U11, U13, U15, U18, and U19 girls’ teams, as well as two women’s hardball teams and an occasional softball team. But only a few years ago, we didn’t have any junior cricket for boys or girls, or any women’s cricket at all. So, just as with the professional women’s game, it’s been an incredible journey.
I grew up in Steventon and played junior cricket here in the early 90s. Over time, though, that group of kids and parents moved on to other things, and junior cricket in the village fizzled out.
Fast forward to 2019, a great year for cricket – with England winning the Men’s World Cup, and that incredible Ashes series – and a friend and I wondered if any kids at the village primary school might want to give cricket a try. We put out a message on a Wednesday and ran an introductory session on the Friday. Around 40 kids turned up, which made us think “there might be something here”!
We then ran a couple more sessions in 2019, and that gave us the confidence to plan to do it properly in 2020, with a full junior programme, including All Stars and Dynamos.
By the end of summer 2020, we had about 70 kids playing, a good number of whom were really talented girls. Over the winter, I spoke to some of their parents about starting a girls’ team, and in April 2021 I contacted a female coach from a nearby club to run a couple of taster sessions - I wanted the girls to see that representation.
We encouraged the original eight or nine girls from the previous year to bring a friend, and the day before the first session, I received about seven messages from parents asking if their daughters could join! We ended up with around 14 at that first session, which was amazing, and we started into the Oxfordshire league with a U15 girls’ team that same year.
From there, things just snowballed. Lots of mums were All Stars activators, and they formed our first softball team later that summer. We organised a girls vs mums match, which was great fun, and also entered some softball festivals, and it was clear there was a lot of talent in the group.
We took a leap of faith and entered the Home Counties Women’s Cricket League in 2022, which created a lovely dynamic where the mums were being supported and encouraged by the more experienced 15-year-olds. It was, and still is, a very special team environment. After a steep learning curve in our first 2 season, we’ve now won back to back promotions!
We first took a women and girls club trip to Lord’s in 2022 – the ODI between England and India when Deepti Sharma ran out Charlie Dean backing up. It was a fantastic day out. Just over 50 of us went, and I’ve been trying to repeat it ever since.
Because of how many teams and fixtures we now have, finding a day when we can all go to something together is difficult, but the Women’s World Cup Final was an easy choice, and when I floated the idea to the squad, the response was huge.
We bought a few extra tickets so that, as we expanded to launch a second women’s team over the winter, we could offer new players the chance to come to the final as well, which has added even more excitement.
We can all see that women’s cricket is growing rapidly. The Hundred has been incredible for Women’s cricket in England, and the Women’s Premier League in India has really accelerated progress globally. We hope that, with the support of our excellent club committee and our local community, the women’s and girls’ section will continue to thrive at Steventon, too!
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If your club would like to attend one of the ICC Women’s T20 Word Cup games this summer, group tickets are available at Womens.T20WorldCup.com/ClubGroup.