Women's cricket returns to Dutch top club HCC

On May 11 this year, a piece of Dutch cricket history will be written when an HCC team participates in the KNCB women's competition for the first time in forty years.

The Haagsche Cricket Club, one of the oldest cricket clubs in the Netherlands, founded in 1878 and always a dominant force in the men's game, has long been unable to run a women's team, although there is a steady stream of girls coming through their strong youth program. .

Unable to play for the club anymore, many have given up the game, while others, such as Dutch internationals Jolet Hartenhof, Maxime Entrop, Caroline de Lange, Sterre Kalis, Frdrique Overdijk and Iris Zwilling, have been forced to move to other clubs. .

But now Iris Zwilling and her sister Mikkie, De Lange, Overdijk and others can retire from the club that gave them a start in the game, and the younger brigade will not be faced with that choice.

One of the latter is 16-year-old Lara Leemhuis, whose father Joost, himself a former Dutch international, is one of the driving forces behind the initiative.

After discussing it for a number of years, Leemhuis said this week, the board came to the conclusion that it was now or never; We were keen to keep the younger girls playing, but it was crucial that the established players were willing to come back to help build the team.

They had been playing for their current clubs for a while and had clearly developed a loyalty towards them, and we didn't want a situation where starting a team caused another club to collapse because we took back all their players.

But at least in 2024, HCC will only participate in the KNCB T20 competition, so the Zwilling sisters and the other internationals will continue to play in the longer format for clubs such as Voorburg, Quick Haag, Rood en Wit and HBS.

In the shorter game, however, the Lionesses will have quite a formidable squad, with the Zwillings, Overdijk, De Lange and Phebe Molkenboer reinforced by 19-year-old Victorian Ruby Cullinan, as well as another former international in Coco Steenstra Toussaint.

We have some very strong players and some social cricketers, says Leemhuis. We hope they have a great time this year, that they are competitive and that we can attract more girls to come and play cricket.

For the longer term, the intention is of course to make women's cricket an integral part of the club and have a thriving women's cricket department. The entire club is happy that this initiative has finally come about.

Iris Zwilling is also happy that the step has been taken.

It will be great to finally have a women's team representing HCC, she says. We aim to be in contention to win the championship, but our main focus is to make this season fun for all our players so that we can create a strong team bond and continue to play in this competition for many years to come.

With three of the four Women's Top Class teams defending champion Voorburg, the HBS-based Hague All Stars and Quick all based in the Hague region and Groen Geel participating in the Hoofdklasse, The Hague apparently has the claim to be the powerhouse of Dutch women's cricket . , although the KNCB will undoubtedly be happy that another team making its debut this year will be the Cricket Combinatie Brabant, based on Wanderers Oss, MOP Vught and HTC Eindhoven.

It will be the first time that a team from the south of the country has participated since the Quick Nijmegen women's team failed in 2017.

The creation of the two new teams will bring the total number of participants in the two formats to eleven, the most in a decade.

When HCC last fielded a women's team in the 1980s, a team that incidentally included the future mothers of Dutch men's internationals Max ODowd, Boris Gorlee and Hidde Overdijk, as well as the latter's sister Frdrique, cricket in the Netherlands was at its peak. of its popularity.

As many as 26 clubs had a women's section, sometimes with two or three teams, but women's football has since suffered the same decline as the men's game, without the compensating increase in the number of players of Asian descent, which now makes up around two-thirds of all male players.

A KNCB working group declared in 2014 (full disclosure: chaired by the current writer) that women's cricket in the Netherlands was in life-threatening danger and made a dozen recommendations to improve the situation, not the least of which was that clubs should take promotion into account of the women's game as a high priority.

In the intervening ten years, four of the eleven teams then active have disappeared, although new ones have been founded by Excelsior 20 Schiedam, HBS and Voorburg; the addition of HCC and CCB is a big step towards the KNCB's goal of a much more extensive women's competition.

Together with the emergence of new gentlemen's clubs in various centers throughout the country, from Groningen in the north to Arnhem in the east and Terneuzen in the south, the board hopes that these are the first green shoots of crickets that have been long awaited. -necessary revival in the Netherlands.

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