By Lilly B, Year 8

On Thursday 27th October, a group of Middlesex U11-U15 girls, including myself, had the amazing opportunity to be trained by Maia Bouchier. Maia is a batting specialist and has represented England at T20s and has played for the Vipers, Southern Brave and Melbourne Stars.

We started the evening with some warm-ups and alternated between coaches for different drills. Maia was one of the coaches as well as two coaches from Primrose Hill. The drills were fun and lively. For the first drill we were with Maia and had to run diagonals picking the ball of the cones and placing it on the next one. The next drill was hand hockey and getting to know each other. The final drill was throwing the ball at a rebound net and the person behind you catches it.

After the warm-up, we did a net session with everyone batting for fifteen minutes. I batted first and the standard of bowling I faced was good, the coaches would also provide good tips to help us improve. Once I had finished batting, I went to bowl. Bowling is my forte and Maia was impressed enough that she asked me to bowl against the U15s, which was a real confidence booster.

Things relaxed after that and I had a chance to bowl spin to Maia for a bit of fun and then we had a Q&A session. There were many interesting questions and Maia was very generous by giving us useful and informative answers. After the Q&A, Maia was kind enough to let us take some of her match clothes back with us. I managed to get a photo, her signed Commonwealth Games t-shirt, her Southern Vipers jumper and a pair of England shorts.

Overall, it was an amazing experience and an unforgettable day. I was taught some hacks to cricket that I did not know and I certainly came out of the session with a lot more stuff than I entered it with! It was also amazing and inspiring to see how eager a professional female cricketer was to help us follow in her footsteps.