There is an urgent need to develop women’s cricket at the grassroots level, believes veteran cricket analyst Dr Joseph Reds Perreira.
In the case of the OECS states, for example, no junior female cricket competitions are being hosted at either the club or school level, leaving the best female players to join boys’ teams. The only real programs at the grassroots levels for cricket playing girls are spearheaded by Alton Crafton in Saint Lucia and Roland Butcher in Barbados. Perreira insists this is not a sustainable model for the growth of women’s cricket.
In an interview with St Lucia Times, the esteemed cricket commentator expressed concern over the lack of structured development for the women’s game.
“The senior women are well looked after, but there is no development for the women’s game,” he said. “There is no effort to work with the CARICOM ministers to get cricket in schools. The only member nation that has club cricket at the girls’ level is Trinidad and Tobago and I haven’t seen any kind of indication that there’s anything planned at that level.”
Perreira warned that this absence of grassroots development is already affecting the region’s performance at the international level, pointing to the struggles of the West Indies Women’s Under-19 team.
“When we look recently at the West Indies Under-19 performance in the World Cup, they looked very ill-prepared and it definitely tells us that we need to start focusing at the Under-12 , 13 and Under-14 levels so that the basic fundamentals are overcome and established within those young girls if we’re going to compete later on and have a wider, a wider based team,” he said.
Saint Lucia has a proud legacy of female representation in West Indies cricket at the highest level of the game. The first Saint Lucians to represent the West Indies in cricket were Veronica Francis and Eugenia Gregg, both of whom debuted for the West Indies Women’s Cricket Team in the early 1990s. This predates the first male cricketer from Saint Lucia to play for the West Indies, Daren Sammy, who made his debut in 2004.
Today, young talents like Qiana Joseph, Zaida James and Nerisa Crafton offer promise for the future of women’s cricket. However, without a structured support system at the grassroots level—not just in Saint Lucia, but across the Caribbean—the long-term sustainability of the women’s game may be in jeopardy. There are other disciplines which are very established in the Caribbean school system amongst girls, so why not cricket?
