By Neto Baptiste
Regional cricket boss, Ricky Skerritt, has agreed that the women’s version of the game has remained stagnant despite the past successes of the senior women’s team.
The Cricket West Indies (CWI) head, who spoke on the Good Morning Jojo Sports Show, said a lack of adequate resources has made it difficult for the regional board to grow the sport at the rate required to keep the team winning at the highest level.
“The key problems that faced West Indies women’s cricket four years ago still plague women’s cricket today, and one of them is not enough resources. Another is not enough domestic input into the teams with new players and not competition for places and so on,” he said.
“They have been playing a fair amount of international cricket, but also we need someone, a West Indian coach preferably, who can partner with Jimmy Adams and successfully take ownership of the team, and of the women’s programme and monitor it on a full-time basis and work to help replenish the team and to keep the team competing at its best,” he added.
Earlier this week, former West Indies captain, Sir Vivian Richards, had noted that the CWI had missed an opportunity to build on the region’s hosting of the 2018 ICC T20 Women’s World Cup.
Skerritt, who was elected to lead the organisation in March last year, said the board is actively pursuing creative ways of raising the required funding to push the game forward, but that territorial boards must also play their part.
“Our job is to help find resources and help to set standards and policies that could be applied locally, vigorously and in a sustainable way. There are some territories that have done a better job of building women’s cricket and one of the things we have mandated recently was that we want an under-15 programme in women’s cricket which we didn’t have, and that is a regional under-15 programme, so the coaches around the region have been looking for under-15 girls to try to start. It doesn’t have to be a big pogramme but we just want to get young talent being spotted and work with,” the CWI head said.
The former player revealed also that the board is currently looking at mimicking one of its male tournaments in hopes it could have similar success with the females.
“We are starting an under-19 girls’ tournament which is something we have been doing with boys for nearly 50 years or certainly 40 years. We haven’t been doing that with the girls as yet, so there is a lot to be done, but everybody has to buy into it and it has to be led in a partnership way between the local authorities and Cricket West Indies and the governments,” he said. In early March, England sailed through to the semi‑finals of the T20 World Cup in Sydney after beating West Indies by 46 runs and forcing the former champions out of the tournament.