New Zealand Cricket's initiative to include U-16 girls

With New Zealand Cricket in its third year of a three-pronged strategy to grow female participation numbers, Yeah! Girls programme is set to include girls up to the age of 16 following a successful season last year, stuff.co.nz reported.

Aimed at primary school girls, the programme provides a chance to everyone to play with smaller pitches and teams. Invercargill was one of a handful of cities to pilot the Yeah! Girls programme in 2019 but the new format was part of a much wider plan to get more women of all ages involved in cricket, project lead Martin Snedden said.

"If young girls are going to play cricket, we need to make it easier to see who the best female cricketers are," he said. "Cricket will only really succeed in engaging women and girls if there's a good balance of women within the key decision-makers."

Initially, there were only 11 women involved in governing cricket throughout the country. The number has increased to 75, including former White Ferns captain and New Zealand Cricket President Debbie Hockley who happens to be the first woman to hold the position.

"If we succeeded in attracting a whole lot of talented women to help us run the game, they would ensure we had much better conversations about how to engage with women and girls in cricket," Sneddon explained.

Following the second prong of New Zealand Cricket's strategy, the organisation had upgraded its contracts, allowing its top 16 female players to pursue professional cricketing careers. Furthermore, the next 60 players had been offered semi-professional contracts.

"Before that, they were constantly faced with having to juggle their cricket careers with normal working careers and that was proving to be pretty difficult for them," Sneddon said.

Another aspect of the strategy is to make female cricketers more visible. Female cricketers are playing on the same days and venues as their male counterparts with the games being televised under New Zealand Cricket's new broadcasting agreements.

"There's a massive step up in terms of the promotion of our female players that's happening at the moment. All of that is coming together to see us try and engage a lot better than we ever have in the past with women and girls. We've made some good early progress but we're still in the early stages of this journey. We've got a long way to go," he said.