The girls are running away with the ball

Sally Jones celebrates the schools that have broken with tradition to promote girls playing formerly male-dominated sports

- Sally Jones

THE teenage batsman thwacked the ball towards square leg and started running, convinced he had plenty of time for a quick single. Fourteen-year-old Malvernian Bethan Manning had other ideas. Swooping like a swallow, she snatched up the ball at full speed and rocketed it into the stumps in one fluid movement. Bull’s eye. The bails flew and the astounded batsman, yards out of his ground, trudged back to the pavilion. ‘Holy cow! Did you see that?’ demanded her cricket master. ‘That’s one of best runouts I’ve ever seen in school cricket—boy or girl.’

Bethan, a Gloucestershire junior county cricketer and member of the school’s under14 team, was the only girl on the pitch, but her teammates celebrated her prowess rather than her gender as they crowded around to congratulate her. Passionate about cricket from her primary school days, Bethan and hundreds of her contemporaries embody a sea change within school sport. Over the past decade, Malvern College in Worcestershire, together with many of the great independent schools, once bastions of masculinity, but now co-ed, has welcomed girls to formerly male-dominated games with startling success—and many are now setting their sights on sporting careers.

Thirty years ago, Brighton College in East Sussex pioneered girls’ cricket. In 1990, future England women’s captain Clare Connor became the first girl to be picked for the 1st XI and the school later produced three members of England’s women’s World Cup squad, Laura Marsh, Holly Colvin, and Sarah Taylor, who had likewise honed their skills in the XI against the likes of Dulwich and Eton.