Towards more women in Norwegian Cricket (#TWINC)

 

The journey so far with the boys (read here) has been extremely satisfactory but a corner of the coaching kitbag (read as heart) felt empty to both me and Bijeyata. When we started coaching the boys, deep-down we wanted to use the platform to facilitate young girls into playing cricket. In Norway, only a handful of young girls play cricket with no organized youth cricket activities for the girls. We wanted to change this. Occasionally, girls came to our training sessions, but they never continued despite a decent effort from our side as well as the boys. 

It became apparent to us that girls need their own space to grow into this sport and it may be possible to have mixed gender teams only once the girls have found their feet. At the same time, we were asked by a few clubs to help them with their girls’ team as they felt they need women coaches to start girls team. But we were not sure if women coaches are a necessity to build girls’ teams. I did have a few chats with Gry Bruaas, NCF’s general secretory then, to start a common training session for girls who show up at ground with different club teams, mostly U13 teams. But it remained as a discussion that was never actioned upon.

In August 2022, our U17 boys’ national team was in Guernsey playing the Division 2 of European U19 world cup qualifiers. Riding on the exceptional talent and UK-based training of the captain, the team qualified to Division 1. I was scoring a game at Stubberudmyra (a cricket ground that will become the center of this story going forward) on that fateful day. Amjad Munir (MASK) came to the ground to distribute sweets to celebrate the occasion. I saw him and Malik Naeem (Haugerud) in a celebratory mood. It was innings break and for some reason I felt the need to go and challenge these imminent sports personalities. I went and approached them and told them upfront that they are indeed celebrating the accolades of the boys, but such occasions will dry up for Norway if we do not focus on girl’s cricket. As per the rules of the International cricket council (ICC), a country will eventually loose ICC membership if they do not have 8 women teams domestically. Norway had only three in 2022. Amjad Munir understood the cause and even otherwise he had wanted to have a girls’ team in his club for some years but without success.

Next time when I encountered Amjad Munir, he confronted me and Bijeyata and asked us to come and help establish a girls’ team for MASK as they needed women coaches to do so. We contemplated our busy weekend schedule during winters that included 6 hours of cricket - club training, national training and U13 boys coaching. Accepting the challenge would mean committing to eight hours of cricket over the weekend spread over the whole city of Oslo (Tøyen, Mortensrud and Grorud). But this was our chance to fill that corner of ‘the coaching kitbag’ and we decided to take it up. This is the same winter when our ‘players’ were transforming into ‘cricketers’. We had almost started to forget how it is to coach ‘how to hold a bat’ for the first time. But we knew that we had done it before, and we can do it again. Over the winter nearly 20 girls showed up at training. 

The main challenge was that we had an hour and a half with several beginner girls (a little far away from being ‘ready’) spanning an age group of 8 to 18 years coming occasionally to training. I took charge of introducing cricket to the new girls every week whereas Bijeyata took charge of skill development of a select few who were regular at training. By the time spring was nearing, we had done the basic groundwork, but we were not sure if we will be able to provide these girls any playing opportunity during the 2023 season as this team would not be ready to play in the hardball T20 women series. And a lack of playing opportunity could mean the end this budding team before it ever took off.

During the autumn and winter, there were changes in the Norwegian cricket landscape. Firstly, Gry had left NCF and we had a new general secretary, Trond Søvik. Secondly, in November, after the leader of Children, Youth and Women (Barn Ungdom og Kvinner) committee resigned, Trond wanted to split the committee in two, like earlier, for efficient development work. He invited me to be a part of the Women committee which he also renamed as gender balance committee. Even though I was already a member of the Selection committee, I agreed to join the newly formed gender balance committee as there was so much to do and I decided to take charge instead of waiting for others t take action. The committee had its first meeting in the end of January 2023, where I, Raksha (committee leader) and Nadeem had such heartfelt discussions that things which seemed far-fetched until a day before suddenly started to seem possible. Among other things we wanted to have an open training session for girls through the year, an open ground in the summer and an open hall during the winters. We discussed of having these twice a month, 2^nd and 4^th Saturday of each month. When I sat down to write the minutes of the meeting that evening, for some reason I wrote ‘Open hall/ground once a week - we will need indoor halls in winter and grounds in summer and qualified coaches’. When I sent the text to my colleagues in the committee surprisingly no one raised an objection. I understood, we all were actually ready to do much more than we talked about. This was a first as in general it’s the opposite. The minutes were sent to NCF and our proposal was accepted. Erik, the development officer at NCF, gave us Stubberudmyra for all Fridays over the summer, a ground where it all started. Now it was the time to plan and execute these open training sessions which we called ‘Open ground Fridays’.

In 2022 April, I and Bijeyata had been to the ICC coach tutor course in Krefeld and when we came back as qualified tutors, we were given the responsibility to conduct ICC level 1 coaching courses in Norway. And over autumn and winter, while were juggling between the 8 hours of cricket during the weekend, we took break for three weekends and organized the three coaching courses (2 in Oslo and 1 in Stavanger). At the end of April 2023 there were 32 qualified ICC level 1 coaches in Norway.

While the three paths (MASK girls’ team, Women committee work to start open training and conducting ICC level 1 coaching courses) ran parallelly up until now, it was time for them to cross each other. Retrospectively, if we missed even one of the three, TWINC would have remained only a dream. The first thing we did was to set up a social media platform (Facebook group – Norges Cricketfordund Kvinner) to spread the word about ‘Open ground Fridays’ and launched it on the International Women’s day with the help of Anne Hofmo Bjølgerud, NCF’s communications advisor. We then conducted meetings with the new level 1 coaches in Oslo to plan the open training session on Fridays at Stubberudmyra and also a meeting with the current players to describe what is their role in the whole initiative and what is in it for them. We also contacted several famous cricketers in the Oslo region for a celebrity session to create a buzz around our open Fridays and to lure the experienced women cricketers in. 

We had set the date of 12^th May to start the ‘Open ground Fridays’ however deep-down I was not sure if many will come. In the past years such open days were a one-off thing annually and did not attract a lot of participants. Thus, the MASK girls team had an important role to play here as I and Bijeyata planned to train them during the open trainings so as to give a perception to the newcomers that there are girls on the ground. Despite all the planning, I won’t lie about not being nervous. 14^th May is celebrated as the International Mother’s Day and that made me think of all the mother of the U13 boys I and Bijeyata had been training for 3 years. Those ladies have rarely been to the ground. I discussed my thoughts with Raksha and together we planned to kick off the Friday open ground as a Mother’s Day celebration. In that pretext we invited the ladies who were called as ‘MOM’ by their favorite cricketers. Many people in the cricket community thought the word ‘MOM’ on the first open day flyer meant man of the match (a common phrase in cricket to describe the best player of a game). Expectedly they never thought that the mothers would be invited to a play cricket. 

Come 12^th May, we were all ready at Stubberudmyra. We had three women coaches (two of whom had taken the ICC coaching course recently) taking charge of the ground, MASK girls experiencing a cricket ground for the first time from inside and a bunch of little boys who came determined to clean bold (a way of getting out in cricket) their mothers. The ground was buzz with only and only positive vibes. We had done it. The only question that remained was will we be able to do it every week for 12 weeks during the summer and will new girls show up.