Tokyo Falcons Juniors: Girls Team Cricket Club

As you know Cricket fever is gearing up in Japan gradually, we’ve all seen and read quite a bit about Cricket Club for Boys Cricket (Junior and Senior) in Japan. However, Tokyo Falcons Cricket Club has started one of the rare sports initiatives by launching – “Girls Cricket”.

Sessions start with a warm-up and exercise, leading to the practice of other areas of cricket.

How did the Girl`s Cricket initiative start?
In late 2017, following the huge interest created within the Falcons Boys Junior team, some of the parents approached the Falcons Junior Cricket club (via Kirti Jain), about doing something similar for Girls. Kirti Jain immediately started a WhatsApp group to gauge interest levels, and soon 10 parents enrolled their daughter to play the cricket. Encouraged by this quick response, a practice session was arranged in Funabori where 12 girls participated with a lot of enthusiasm – most of them holding a bat in their hands for the first time.

They didn’t quite hold the skills yet to throw balls etc but they showed great discipline and were concentrating hard in all the drills (batting, bowling, and fielding – that were demonstrated in the session), and were quickly picking up the basics.

Japan Cricket Association (JCA) involvement

The Falcons Juniors Management then reached out to the Japan Cricket Association (JCA) with this news who were equally excited by this new development and sent over a kit bag with some practice equipment (bats, rubber balls, stumps etc), as none of them had their own equipment for the practice sessions.

Parent`s active involvement too
The practice sessions started getting conducted regularly every weekend and now, several parents like stepped in and started to teach basic cricket skills to the girls during these sessions along with Tokyo Falcons coaches. They started doing short matches at the end which made participating and enthusiastic girls aware of some of the rules and also created some excitement amongst them. Some of the elder girls displayed a lot of power while playing their shots and it was only a matter of some practice that these girls would start playing in competitions.

Coaches and Parents watching a ball during a big hit

Girls participate in U-12 Cricket Blast

On 14^th October 2018, the Falcons sent the Girls team to the U-12 Cricket Blast held at the Edogawa Cricket Ground event (6 teams, 6 players per team, 6 overs each). Six girls who joined the event showed great strength on the day, improving their performance in each of the 4 matches that they played and won the hearts of everyone present at the ground. The JCA also recognized this as the 1st time ever in their Cricket Blast event history that an All-Girls team had participated!

Japan National Women Team:

Many of us may not be aware, but there is also a Japan National Women’s team, and if these girls continue to show the interest and keep practicing, some of them may one day land up playing for Japan in the National team. Mr. Dhugal Bedingfield (Community Cricket Manager of the JCA and Japan National team coach) and Mr. Alan Curr (Operations Head of the JCA) have both shown a lot of interest in this initiative and are very keen for Falcons to continue pursuing it.

With support from the parents, Falcons Senior team members and the Junior Club Managers, this should certainly be possible and we wish the Tokyo Falcons all the very best for the same! This is a great platform for girls to take part in organized team sport which helps them develop some of the physical skills and also qualities like discipline, teamwork, etc which will be very useful for them even later in life. Even back home in India, there is a lot of interest these days in Women’s cricket and our Women cricketers are consistently making the country proud.

If you would like to enroll your girl(s) in this initiative for the next season (2019) and are willing to contribute as a parent, please contact by Email: falconstokyo@gmail.com

Source: Kirti Jain

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