Page 13 - West Pennant Hills Cherrybrook Cricket Club Yearbook 2015-16

JUNIOR GIRLS REPORT
2015/16 was a very exciting year for the Girls at WPHCCC. Having seen considerable growth in numbers the previous season through the success of our initial T20 Blast program I had concerns that the follow up and matching the success would be hard to do.
We were fortunate to incorporate some sessions for girls only at a couple of our Schools Development sessions in July where we ran T20 Blast sessions and my very great thanks to Janelle Lord at Oakhill Drive for allowing us to showcase T20 to every girl in years 3 to 6, and to our newest school at Murray Farm where Terry Gorrie helped us with a smaller session but still a great experience and provided many new girls keen to play.
Rego day arrived and we quickly realised that our numbers were even greater than the previous season.
Cricket NSW rebranded the Girls competitions this season as the Sixers Girls Cricket League and Under 13’s and Under 17’s competitions established. We started the season with two teams in the 13’s and one in the 17’s.
Sanjay Thakur volunteered his services to coach the Under 17’s and they had an outstanding season winning the spring competition. We entered the summer competition with a squad of 11 and closely followed Cricket NSW directives on sharing all roles and sadly this backfired as other teams were clearly not doing the same. Results were disappointing but at the end of the day all of the girls had great opportunities to develop their cricketing skills.
There were some outstanding performances among the team, with Anushka scoring 160 runs at an average of 53.3 and Zoya taking an incredible 19 wickets at just 5.95. The team was superbly led again by Jae and fully deserved her Team award at our Presentation night.
We managed to raise two teams for the Under 13 Spring competition and they were coached by Mal and Prem. Almost of the girls were new to hardball cricket in these two teams and each and every one of them fully deserve great credit for the way that they played and adapted to a hard ball. Training was a lot of fun with the girls forming wonderful friendships and while the teams did not challenge for honours the main thing was that they improved each and every week and they enjoyed themselves.
During the Christmas break we managed to form a third Under 13 team so had three out of six teams playing in the competition. The third team was coached by Anthony Hale.
All up we had 34 girls playing Saturday afternoon cricket by the end of the season with ages ranging from 10 to 17 and this augurs well for the future of the Club.
Hopefully we will see more girl’s make the step up from the T20 to Saturday cricket next year and we will certainly have increased numbers playing in the older age group next year.
My special thanks to Sanjay, Mal, Prem and Anthony for coaching the girls and for Michelle, Vanessa, Jo and Collette for managing the teams. The girls could not have achieved what they did without all your support.
The T20 Blast was again run at Edward Bennett Oval on Friday nights and we again managed 32 girls for the spring sessions and a total of 22 for the summer. Quite a few of the older girls had transitioned to Saturday cricket from last season so we had a generally younger group and there were certainly some fine skills on show again. The weather was sadly not so kind before Christmas with two weeks being washed out and a third by extreme heat. However, the cricket, singing dancing and music all allowed a great format to be enjoyed by all.
Huge thanks to Jo for taking on the catering on Friday nights this season. She did a great job arranging the sausage sizzle each week so that the girls and their families did not starve as well as demonstrating her massive enthusiasm for supporting her daughters.
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