Shelley Nitschke's evolution in Australian cricket

When Shelley Nitschke retired from her career as a national cricketer in 2011 after playing 122 matches for Australia, she had no intention of pursuing a coaching career.

Initially she wanted to take some time away from the sport, which she did for a few years before taking on a development role with the South Australian Cricket Association.

After a few years in regional development, Nitschke moved into the high-performance space, and that's when she realized this was what she really loved to do.

When I came back to that high-performance environment, I probably realized how much I missed it and that I really enjoyed being in and around high-performance, high-performing teams again, Nitschke says. Women's agenda.

She featured in the Australian Women's Cricket Team in 2018, alongside then-coach Matthew Mott, and later coached the Perth Scorchers.

In 2022, Nitschke threw her hat into the ring to take on the top role of coaching the women's team and was successful in getting the job. Shed had already been interim head coach for a few months at the time, following Mott's departure.

It was really exciting. It's a great team, and it's a huge honor to be given the role and responsibility of coaching the Australian women's cricket team, given all our recent success and where the game is going, Nitschke said.

There was definitely an element of, this is real now. When I got that permanent role, it was an honor, exciting, but also terrifying.

How Nitschke approaches leadership as a Head Coach

The main thing I keep coming back to is being authentic and supporting myself, but also caring and challenging.

With more women in leadership roles in Australian sport than ever before, we have witnessed a wave of new leadership styles coming through the ranks. For Nitschke, she sees all the different leadership styles as effective, but most of all, she tries to be consistent in what she does.

I don't think there is one formula that you encounter in the sports world, Nitschke explains.

There are so many different coaches and styles of coaches, and they all have their nuances, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. But consistency is key.

The astronomical growth of women's cricket

Nitschke retired from her playing career in 2011, and she says it's hard to fathom how far the game has come in the decade since her retirement. As head coach of the women's team, she had a special insight into the growth of the sport, from international level to grassroots.

That was 13 years ago and the growth from there to now has been amazing. You would expect it to take 20 years, she says.

Players can now be full-time cricketers, and there's growth in the franchise space and just the fact that I coach the women's national team, and they're all full-time, I'm full-time and I have full-time staff, so the growth is really positive.

There have been so many changes, and it has trickled down to domestic players as well, and even the groundswell of younger players getting interested in the game.

The growth during that time was actually astronomical.

Where to go for women's cricket?

For Nitschke, it would be great to draw big crowds for the Australian women's cricket team domestically in the coming years and see other countries around the world build strong national teams.

From an Australian perspective, we even go abroad to India and England and get a lot of audiences there, she says. I would love to see that we can really get a good audience on home soil. I don't think we're quite there yet.

Nitschke notes how special it was to witness the overwhelming crowd of 86,174 people who gathered at the Melbourne Cricket Ground for the 2020 T20 World Cup final.

And just from a global perspective, the landscape is probably dominated by three or four very strong teams. I would like to see other countries really build up and challenge themselves and have strong international competition, which is certainly already moving in that direction.

Meanwhile, one of the highlights of Nitschke's job is seeing young children interact with the players on the women's team. And the best part? It's not just girls who are interested, boys too.

Once upon a time there were clinics on the oval, and it was all girls because it was the females who played, she says.

But now I think it's great when there are young guys who want to get autographs from our players.

Thanks to our partner CommBank. CommBank supports women in business and the community across all industries and sectors through its Women in Focus team. For more information, visit WomeninFocus.com.au.