When the historic day-night women’s Ashes Test starts on Thursday, Sharon Tredrea will be at an MCG luncheon honouring every woman who has played a Test match against Australia’s oldest cricket foe. The former captain remains close to several of her old teammates. None of them know that, at 70, she’s still playing.
“I just say I’ve been helping out at the club,” says Tredrea, ever understated and good-humoured. “They don’t need to know, I’d get a lot of flak!”
Through helping others she has helped herself – not least to fall in love again with a game she played so well that her 41 international appearances reaped three World Cup wins, and in the 1980s gave her bragging rights as the fastest female bowler in the world.
For Apollo Bay, deep in cricket’s grassroots, it’s been a joyous boon. The girls’ team Tredrea was enlisted to help coach spawned a women’s side that’s included local mums, school staff, a bank teller, bakery owner and an Irish ex-hurler, all queueing up to learn from an Australian Cricket Hall of Famer. A second girls’ team is planned for next season.
It’s a parable of the power of community, and the benefits of staying active as we age. “They don’t have an excuse that they’re too old,” Tredrea laughs. “I’ve stopped that!”
Partner Ann’s family had a beach shack at Marengo, and they moved permanently in 2009. After her last club game in Melbourne in the mid-1990s, Tredrea “never wanted to see a cricket ball again, I was just tired”.
Driving past the Apollo Bay ground in summer she’d stop and watch for a while, but never contemplated getting closer – until club stalwarts Gav Clissold and Toby Caddy started knocking on her door. And kept knocking until she said yes. “I just thought, ‘What can I add?’”
Caddy says the answer was “plenty”; on the first girls’ training night he was asked, “What’s an over?” Tredrea was “all in” pretty much straight away, intoxicated by their will to improve, to encourage and support each other and the sheer fun of it all. “They’re a unique bunch of young ladies.”
The under-13 girls won the Colac and District league title in their first season. Then Caddy told her they were putting together a women’s team, “and you know you’re going to have to play”.
They started from a long way back. She recalls the first game featuring so many wides and no-balls that the umpire quietly asked her late in the day if she’d be bowling the last over. “I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because you have to bowl six legitimate balls – and I’d like to get home tonight!’”
Tredrea says she is “only rolling my arm over”. Caddy counters that she’s basically a human bowling machine at training. The urge to really let one go in a game has surfaced, “but I know I can’t so I’ve got to use my brains and do something different”.
Recovery features some gentle stretching, a hot bath or shower, “maybe a soft drink!” By Tuesday training she’s good to go again.
People stop her in the street to talk women’s and girls’ cricket, as well as men’s and boys. Table tennis and pool tables (donated by Tredrea) host mother-son and father-daughter contests as up to 60 people sit down to Thursday night dinners. The legend who once made a half-century at Lord’s and toured India and the West Indies now revels in bus trips to Pomborneit, Bookar and Tomahawk Creek, as servo-bought karaoke microphones are passed from seat to seat.
“There’s just this amazing sense of being part of a group, and having a lot of fun – the joy is so infectious. And it started to filter through the club – they all thought we were mad!
“I think I get more out of it than they do. I get genuine joy watching them, they’ve all grown so much as young girls. Even the women, they’ve got a certain confidence about them.”
There have been many precious moments, like the husband of a women’s team player telling her they’d lived in the area for nearly 20 years and this was the first time his wife had really felt part of something. “Which all just ends up back at community again.”
She’s grateful Caddy and Clissold kept knocking. “I didn’t know what I was missing out on. I’d have to say the involvement here has been as enjoyable as anything I’ve done. I love it.”