by Ask former rugby league international Courtney Winfield-Hill about her playing days and she’ll tell you – half-joking – that she’s not retired, she’s just on a gap year. It’s just that so far, this sabbatical “year” has lasted two (she hasn’t set foot on a rugby field since the end of the 2022 World Cup), and involved a dizzying number of coaching missions and a return to his old life. sport: cricket.
His latest assignment is as assistant coach for England’s women’s tour of Ireland, which begins on Saturday with the first of three one-day internationals in Belfast, followed by two T20s in Dublin. The matches are full internationals, but a clash with the UAE’s World Cup build-up means England are effectively sending an A team.
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Up to seven players could make their international debuts, including 30-year-old Georgia Adams, who had probably given up hope of being recalled by England, and 19-year-old striker Seren Smale, whose first chance to represent them was country at the next level is coming much sooner than expected.
“We may have to make room in the calendar for cap presentations,” says Winfield-Hill. “But what’s exciting is that the stories behind each of these hats will be so different. This is a unique opportunity.
If going from playing rugby to coaching cricket seems like an unusual career trajectory, just consider it a normal one for the 37-year-old: how many other women born and raised in rural Queensland have gone on to represent England in rugby league? And how many have done so after two decades away from the sport, spent playing Australian cricket and the Big Bash? The explanation for all this comes down to the purest of human experiences: love.
Winfield-Hill’s sliding doors moment was meeting English cricketer Lauren Winfield when they were teammates for the Brisbane Heat in the Women’s Big Bash League. After two years of negotiations for a long-distance relationship, the couple moved to England and are now married. It was a chance observation of an Instagram post from Leeds Rhinos looking for players that drew her back to rugby league; she then qualified for England via residency. At the same time, this decision also prompted a rethink of his career, moving from teaching to coaching.
Is it all Lauren’s fault, then? “It still does,” Courtney says. “If I had stayed in Australia, I might not have made this big leap. But given that I moved half a planet and turned around my entire life, I figured, “Why not turn around my career too?” »
So far, the move has paid off. There was an early gig with Lauren’s team, Northern Diamonds, based in Headingley – yes, she coached her wife; yes, it involved a few lines; and yes, Courtney threw a good old Australian sled.
Since hanging up her rugby boots, she has served as assistant coach for the Heat in the WBBL, Royal Challengers Bengaluru in the Women’s Premier League, Trent Rockets in the Hundreds and the A and Under teams. 19 year old from England. “I love bouncing around in different groups,” she says.
She is known for her unconventional methods: at the Diamonds, she introduced the concept of Fun Fridays and trained England A wicketkeeper Bess Heath as a left-handed hitter to accustom her to switch hitting. “I definitely think outside the box,” she says. “Sometimes things get too serious – I’d like to think you can still take things seriously without taking away the play, adventure and experimentation.”
The other unusual thing about Winfield-Hill is that she is an openly gay woman. English cricket coaching continues to be a heavily masculine heteronormative space: six of the eight regional women’s teams are coached by men and there are more men called Jon Lewis involved in England women’s coaching than of women.
Winfield-Hill praises Yorkshire head of coaching development Kevin Gresham for taking him on the England and Wales Cricket Board’s first Level 2 coaching course in 2018, but acknowledges the problem: “He There were 52 people on this course and one woman, and that woman was me.
So is she a role model for the women and girls she coaches? “It’s not something that you’re conscious of, but you just hope that you can leave positive footprints wherever you are, and if people want to follow the footprints, or if they want to follow their own path, then that’s awesome.”
It’s unclear what the future holds for Winfield-Hill. She hasn’t left rugby entirely – in May she joined the Rugby Football League as a senior women’s and girls’ partner – and she’s flying to Australia in October, for another coaching stint of the WBBL.
She is noncommittal about whether she might, one day, take on a senior international coaching role: “I don’t set goals. There will be random things that come to me that excite me, and I’ll be excited to get into those spaces.
One thing is clear: English cricket would do well to retain its talent, for as long as the ‘gap year’ lasts.
