Our latest weekly “Sport: In Focus” features Year 12 Ellie R and cricket, her favourite sport.

“Hi! My name is Ellie and one of my sports that I play is cricket. Although I haven’t made it to training this year, I have played as a member of Ealing Cricket Club since I was 6 years old. I mainly joined because both of my brothers went, but I found that I really enjoyed the sport and the community that came with the Friday night training sessions. I then joined the Girls’ Academy and begun to train on Tuesdays as well. This really helped me to improve and gain more confidence to play in matches. One of my favourite memories was when I was at the nets with my family. We were practicing and my brother said, ‘I think that’s Harry Potter in the net next to us!’ Turns out they were hosting a charity match with all the cast at the cricket ground, so of course we had to get a picture and get our bats signed! One of my favourite matches I played for Ealing CC was at South Hampstead Cricket Club and our coach told us at half time that our score was awful and it was going to be almost impossible to win. We went into fielding, pressuring them by supporting our team mates and talking about random things. This put them off their batting and we ended up winning the game!

Once I joined the school in Year 7, the cricket club was not that popular until I persuaded all my friends to join and then we made up the team until Year 11. I think our whole team will remember the time that Ms Munro said she would buy us all ice cream if we came in the top four and sure enough, we were all sat on the tube eating ice cream – very sunburnt – at the end of the day! It’s great to see so many younger girls get involved with cricket at the school and I enjoy getting the opportunity to coach them. Hopefully with more people getting involved in hardball earlier, Oxford High School will get a run for their money with the GDST Select Team! If anyone has any questions about joining Ealing CC, let me know and I’ll be happy to answer any.”