Groningen Women’s Cricket Team Struggles to Launch
- Anna Milovanovic
- Oct 3, 2024
- 3 min read
Despite efforts to recruit women to Groningen’s cricket team, it was not able to compete this summer with the men’s team. The Royal Netherlands Cricket Association (KNCB) sees this as part of a wider trend within the country.
Globally, cricket —a bat and ball sport involving two competing teams of 11 players — is the second-most watched sport, and its membership is growing in the Netherlands, according to KNCB’s 2024 Annual Report.
The 135-year old association says it that although two new women’s clubs have been established since 2023, “2024 requires the implementation of specific interventions and recruitment campaigns at the clubs for the focus groups (girls and women) because we see only limited growth in these groups.”
The gender gap for the sport in 2024 is 4,138 men were registered playing cricket members, compared to 238 women.
At the local level
Amee Awasthi, the Representative of Women and Youth for the Phoenix Cricket Club Groningen, says “we might not reach 12 or 14 to play with the season, so we are in talks with other clubs about combining two teams together. (…) We require four or five more [players] to formally enrol a team.”
Their strategy to recruit more women involves reaching out to universities, for players who are 18 and older. Also, there is a chance to recruit some players a little younger, using a waiver if they are 16, she explains.
Awasthi says that while many of the Dutch people in the area are curious about cricket, they may not know the club is there, so the club has registered with Sports 50 and is also advertising in nearby neighborhoods. They also do outreach via inter-club clinics, with hockey clubs or with football clubs.
“The hope is for next summer to have our own women’s team. It’s a fair thing that they [the women] get a chance,” she said.
The Team’s Roots
Jacques Malherbe, who assisted with founding the men’s team, says it took around 18 months from having the initial idea of forming the men’s team to registering it and then playing official games.
What began with a Facebook post to see if anyone wanted to play cricket in the Groningen area resulted in the formation of a group who wanted to formalise themselves as a team.
“We started by organizing 1-day indoor cricket tournaments. With the help of the KNCB, with the goal of raising enough money to start a formal cricket club,” he recounted.
Four such tournaments later, they were able to pitch the principle of a formal cricket team to KNCB and The Municipality of Groningen, eventually obtaining use the municipal ground at Kardinge.
Malherbe says, “KNCB provided some initial support for setting up the indoor tournaments, they raised some money to put towards forming a club. They also provided equipment bats, balls and stumps. Since then, they have helped with financing of a pitch.”
Looking Forward
The men’s team of the Phoenix Cricket Club Groningen has just completed its first official season. “The team was really amazing, since it’s the first year I didn’t expect that good [of a] performance from the team,” says Aljo Thomas, Chairman of the club.
Thomas explains that the club is currently searching for a warehouse to rent and turn into an indoor pitch so players can go and train anytime, winter or rain. Regardless, every weekend there will training sessions and there will be two indoor tournaments over the winter.
“The goal is to have more spread more about cricket in the Northern part of the Netherlands. I want everyone to come and experience it,” he says.
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