It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman who plays a winter sport, must be in want of a summer sport. With this in mind, we, that is, the Merrion ladies section, decided to try and entice to cricket some of the many hockey players found wandering aimlessly around Dublin over the summer months.
What we have found in the last few years is that the disparity in experience and ability between our top players and beginners is so large that it makes training together very difficult. Time, therefore, dedicated solely to improving the skills of newcomers or beginners is something we badly need.
And that is how we came up with the ‘Hockey players cricket conversion day’. Not the catchiest title I’ll admit, but it does what it says on the tin.
Tag rugby has herded a large number of the hockey breed into competitions over the last few summers, but with the success of the recent Cricket World Cup and the visibility of the sport and some of its players in the media at the moment, we felt now was the time to try and bring bigger numbers into cricket.
Why hockey players? Well, they use a stick and hard ball, have good hand-eye coordination and we know a lot of them! We don’t discriminate though – friends who play other sports were also invited.
The next challenge was to get them to the club. What could possibly persuade a bunch of girls to come down and try a new sport? We went for sunshine and a barbecue – admittedly pinning a lot on the hope that the weather would hold out for us!
We asked the girls to give us two hours of their time on a Sunday afternoon in which to show them some cricket skills and in return we cooked them burgers and sausages aplenty.
Thankfully the sun was shining and the barbecue went down a treat. Oh, and the cricket wasn’t too bad either. We focused on the aspect of cricket we thought would interest them the most, batting, to get them hooked before we approached the issue of bowling.
Identifying the pull as a fun shot that hockey players would find easy, we used plastic bats and balls and the girls were soon hitting sixes and fours. Once the girls’ confidence was up, they gave the off-drive a go and didn’t make too bad a fist of it either.
The sun really came out after practice and sitting in the sunshine, watching the Ireland Women’s team take on Merrion 6ths with a burger in one hand and a drink in the other gave the now converted hockey players an idea of what their summer could look like.
The good news is that I really think we have some new players to add to our 2nds team, but it wasn’t all positives. Our numbers were lower than we had hoped owing to the fact that college exams are on soon, so if you are planning on trying this at your club I would recommend avoiding exam-time.
We only bought enough food for ourselves, but we were soon inundated with requests from spectators to buy burgers. As we got more and more requests, we realised we could have covered our costs if we had used some entrepreneurial savvy. Next time.
And there will be a next time. In a few weeks we will focus on fielding and bowling, followed by, or course, another barbecue. It was a very worthwhile venture which I would recommend to others looking to recruit new female talent.