How Sharon Tredrea fell back in love with cricket at Apollo Bay

When the historic day-night women’s Ashes Test starts on Thursday, Sharon Tredrea will be at an MCG luncheon honouring every woman who has played a Test match against Australia’s oldest cricket foe. The former captain remains close to several of her old teammates. None of them know that, at 70, she’s still playing.

“I just say I’ve been helping out at the club,” says Tredrea, ever understated and good-humoured. “They don’t need to know, I’d get a lot of flak!”

Through helping others she has helped herself – not least to fall in love again with a game she played so well that her 41 international appearances reaped three World Cup wins, and in the 1980s gave her bragging rights as the fastest female bowler in the world.

For Apollo Bay, deep in cricket’s grassroots, it’s been a joyous boon. The girls’ team Tredrea was enlisted to help coach spawned a women’s side that’s included local mums, school staff, a bank teller, bakery owner and an Irish ex-hurler, all queueing up to learn from an Australian Cricket Hall of Famer. A second girls’ team is planned for next season.

It’s a parable of the power of community, and the benefits of staying active as we age. “They don’t have an excuse that they’re too old,” Tredrea laughs. “I’ve stopped that!”

Partner Ann’s family had a beach shack at Marengo, and they moved permanently in 2009. After her last club game in Melbourne in the mid-1990s, Tredrea “never wanted to see a cricket ball again, I was just tired”.

Driving past the Apollo Bay ground in summer she’d stop and watch for a while, but never contemplated getting closer – until club stalwarts Gav Clissold and Toby Caddy started knocking on her door. And kept knocking until she said yes. “I just thought, ‘What can I add?’”

Caddy says the answer was “plenty”; on the first girls’ training night he was asked, “What’s an over?” Tredrea was “all in” pretty much straight away, intoxicated by their will to improve, to encourage and support each other and the sheer fun of it all. “They’re a unique bunch of young ladies.”

The under-13 girls won the Colac and District league title in their first season. Then Caddy told her they were putting together a women’s team, “and you know you’re going to have to play”.