Ask the former rugby league international Courtney Winfield-Hill about her playing days and she will tell you – only half-jokingly – that she isn’t retired, she is just on a gap year. It’s just that so far, that gap “year” has lasted two (she hasn’t stepped on to a rugby pitch since the end of the 2022 World Cup), and has involved a dizzying number of coaching gigs and a return to her original sport: cricket.
Her latest assignment is as an assistant coach on England Women’s tour to Ireland, which starts on Saturday with the first of three one-day internationals in Belfast, followed by two T20s in Dublin. The matches are full internationals but a clash with preparation for the World Cup in the United Arab Emirates means England are effectively sending an A squad.
Up to seven players could make their international debuts, including the 30-year-old Georgia Adams, who had probably given up hope of an England call-up and the 19-year-old batter Seren Smale, whose first chance to represent her country at senior level is coming far sooner than expected.
“We might have to make some space in the schedule for the cap presentations,” Winfield-Hill says. “But what’s exciting is that the stories behind each of those caps will be so different. It’s a unique opportunity.”
If going from playing rugby league to coaching cricket sounds an unusual career trajectory, just consider it par for the course for the 37-year-old: how many other women born and raised in rural Queensland have gone on to represent England at rugby league? And how many have done it after a two-decade absence from the sport, spent playing Aussie state and Big Bash cricket? The explanation for it all comes down to that purest of human experiences: love.
Courtney’s sliding-doors moment was meeting the England cricketer Lauren Winfield while they were teammates for Brisbane Heat in the Women’s Big Bash League. After two years of long distance, the pair settled in England and are now married. It was a chance sighting of a Leeds Rhinos Instagram post seeking players that drew her back into rugby league; she went on to qualify for England via residency. Meanwhile, the move also prompted a career rethink, away from teaching and into coaching.
Is it all Lauren’s fault, then? “It always is,” Courtney says. “Had I stayed in Australia, maybe I wouldn’t have taken that leap. But given that I’ve shifted half a planet and flipped my entire life on its lid, I just felt like: ‘Why not flip my career on its head as well?’”
So far, the flip has paid off. There was an initial gig with Lauren’s team, the Headingley-based Northern Diamonds – yes, she did coach her wife; yes, it did involve a few rows; yes, Courtney did throw in some good old Aussie sledging.
Since hanging up her rugby boots, she has undertaken assistant coaching stints for Heat in the WBBL, Royal Challengers Bengaluru in the Women’s Premier League, Trent Rockets in the Hundred and England’s A and under-19 squads. “I love bouncing around different groups,” she says.
She is known for her unconventional methods: at the Diamonds, she introduced the concept of Fun Fridays and made the England A wicketkeeper Bess Heath train as a left-handed batter to get her used to switch-hitting. “I definitely think outside the box,” she says. “Sometimes things get too serious – I’d like to think you can still take things seriously without removing the play and the adventure and the experimentation.”
The other unusual thing about Winfield-Hill is that she is an openly gay woman. English cricket coaching continues to be a heavily male, heteronormative space: six out of the eight women’s regional teams are coached by men and there are more males called Jon Lewis involved in England Women’s coaching setup than females.
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Winfield-Hill praises Yorkshire’s coach development manager, Kevin Gresham, who got her on to the initial England and Wales Cricket Board level 2 coaching course in 2018, but acknowledges the problem: “There were 52 people on that course and one female, and that female was me.”
Is she therefore a role model to the women and girls she coaches? “It’s not something that you’re conscious of, but you just hope that you can leave positive footprints wherever you are, and if people want to follow the footprints, or they want to walk their own path, then that’s great.”
It is unclear what the future holds for Winfield-Hill. She hasn’t totally left rugby behind – in May, she joined the Rugby Football League as its senior women and girls’ partner – and she is off to Australia in October, for another WBBL coaching stint.
She is noncommittal about whether she might, one day, take on a senior international coaching role: “I’m not a goal setter. There’ll be random things that come at me which excite me, and I’ll be excited to step into those spaces.”
One thing is clear: English cricket would do well to keep hold of her talents, for as long as the “gap year” lasts.
