Cover feature
Cricket is not well known in Waterloo Region, but Monali Patel aims to change all that
Monali Patel is a national cricket player as well as a certified coach. She is determined that local youths — girls as well as guys — will have access to the sport.
TED WILLIAMS, arguably the greatest baseball hitter of all time, once said, “I think without question the hardest single thing to do in sport is to hit a baseball.” Kitchener resident Monali Patel, arguably one of the top female cricket players in Canada, disagrees.
“Watching baseball to me is like ripping my hair out, to be honest,” she says. “You are swinging and missing, and swinging and missing, and there are gaps in this field that you can actually hit it to.”
In cricket, on the other hand, the ball bounces unpredictably before it is in batting range, there are 10 defenders lurking in the field, and the bowler is actively trying to hit/hurt you.
Cricket is a sport many Canadians find alien and confusing, so most of us will have to take Patel’s word for it. And we probably should.
Patel, 24, is the lead batter for the Canadian Women’s National Cricket team, a certified coach and a force dedicated to bringing a sport beloved around the world to a new generation of local children as one of very few female head coaches of a cricket club in Canada.
The degree of difficulty in Patel’s rise to the top of the national cricket scene is also profound.
As a woman in a sport where colonial vestiges of chauvinism still rear their head, she’s fought through barriers off the pitch that have tested her will and sharpened her competitive drive.
“I used to hate cricket,” she says. “I was born in Kenya, and I was there until I was 11, and growing up I could not stand it. Everything that you saw was men, and I thought: why would I want to be involved in a sport without >>
>> women?” That didn’t stop her from playing casually though. “We used to play street cricket, or gully cricket,” she says. “But I always wanted to play soccer, or other sports that I knew women played.”
Things changed when her family made the difficult decision to leave an affluent life in Kenya in 2001 for the stability of Canada.
“In Kenya we had drivers, we had maids, we had everything ironed down to our underwear and everything polished,” she says. “So coming here and doing it all yourself was tough.”
But that do-it-yourself struggle galvanized the entire Patel family. Patel’s mother, Bina, proved particularly resilient after an initial rough patch.
“We came here and right away my mom hated it,” Patel admits. “She was the CEO of three sister companies in Kenya.”
As is frustratingly typical for many new Canadians, starting over in a new country meant her mother struggled to find work commensurate with her skills and experience.
“She started in a factory, was there for one day, and said, ‘This is not for me,’ ” Patel says of her mother. “Then she worked at the restaurant at the GRT (Grand River Transit) stop downtown, Transfers. When she first applied there, she gave them her resumé and they were like, ‘Are you serious?’ ”
It may not have been Bina’s dream job, but she was indeed serious about providing for her family no matter what it took. After several years, Patel’s mother eventually parlayed her success at the transit station café to a small business loan, which has since blossomed into a burgeoning empire of discount retail and party-supply stores across the region, including the Victoria Party Store in Kitchener.
Recently Monali launched her own wedding and events company named Starlet. Located a few doors from her mother’s Party Store, the venture allows her to transfer the drive and commitment she displays on the cricket pitch to the business world.
Having a dynamic and successful female role model willing to make tough sacrifices was also critical in inspiring Patel to get into cricket when the family first arrived in Canada.
“One day I was just sitting at my computer Googling stuff and I came across women’s cricket on BBC,” Patel says. “I looked more into it and there was something that just spoke to me, that I need to do it.”
At age 15, she joined a local cricket club. Though Patel was fearless, and had skills and toughness from playing on the streets of Kenya, she realized that no matter how hard she tried, she was still treated “like a girl.”
Undeterred, she pressed on. “I went to Toronto and joined an all-men’s club called Tranzac Cricket Academy. Oh my God, I was the only girl, but I did not feel like the only girl. I was playing with guys who didn’t care that I was a girl. I would either learn fast or come home with bruises.”
She ended up both bruised and a significantly better player. With the opportunity to hone her skills against decent competition, she quickly established herself as a fearless lead batter and a tenacious defender.
This caught the attention of the Canadian Women’s National Cricket Team. She made her Canadian debut at just 18 in 2007. She has since established herself as a critical member of the team and has played an important role in wins over the United States in the Women’s Americas Championship.
As someone with her skill level does, she turned professional and played in women’s leagues in Australia and Trinidad. Having now returned to Canada permanently, Patel plays in both a women’s and men’s league in Toronto.
The level of commitment required to be on the Canadian Women’s National Cricket Team is steep. Team members come from across the country and the team’s headquarters are in Toronto, so frequent practices would be cost and time prohibitive.
The team usually only meets for a week to practise as a team before tournaments. The rest of the time they train on their own
while trying to stay in contact as much as possible via the Internet and telephone.
Another interesting aspect of the national team is that it is made up of 12 different cultural backgrounds, with only one Canadian-born player on the roster.
“This is cricket in Canada,” Patel says with a shrug. Patel doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to her opinion on cricket in this country (or anything really). She feels that, in general, there is a lack of support for the sport she loves. But more than that, she believes that young women are still being left out of the equation. She plans to change all that with the same heart and commitment that helped her rise to the top of the sport.
“I can’t keep playing forever,” she says. “And that’s not the plan. The plan is for me to get younger people involved, so they can take over.” While Patel is committed to developing youth cricket in the region, it was her colleague Evan Bjorkenstam who got the ball rolling in February 2013. A Canadian-born tradesman with no previous exposure to cricket, Bjorkenstam fell in love with the sport when he became friends with a handful of Sri Lankan colleagues at his job in Mississauga. Hoping to get his son involved in the game (and avoid dragging him to the Toronto area every time he wanted to play) Bjorkenstam partnered with the Williamsburg Community Association in Kitchener and rallied about 12 children together for casual matches.
It was fun, but the matches lacked structure. That’s when Patel entered the picture. “I managed to get her name from someone; I contacted her and before I knew it, she became our head coach. Everything else is history,” says Bjorkenstam. “Evan is Canadian, and he is as Canadian as they come. He played hockey growing up,” says Patel, recounting their early encounters. “I sat there and I listened to this Canadian’s idea of cricket and I just thought: Oh my >>
>> God, I cannot believe he is saying some of these things. He described cricket as a nice sport, and I was just like: I have no idea what you are talking about, dude. It’s not a nice sport.”
It was that kind of straightforward attitude that helped their partnership take off. “She has a very clear idea of herself and of cricket and what she wants to accomplish as a coach,” Bjorkenstam says. “It is really great to have that. The kids pick up on that, and it is great to have a role model like that.”
Both Patel and Bjorkenstam agreed that what cricket in Canada needed, and where Waterloo Region could be a national leader, was more serious youth development and more development for girls especially.
The first step in that journey was launching the Region of Waterloo Cricket Association about a year ago and setting a clear mandate to grow cricket in the area by setting a target of 40 per cent participation for women and girls in their club — including the board of directors, coaching staff and players.
The next step was actually finding children who wanted to play. For this, Bjorkenstam reached out with great success using social media. “We went from zero kids to 75 kids by the time the first summer came around,” says Patel.
As the cricket association approaches its second summer, the organization is getting serious.
They ended their partnerships with local community associations because of restrictions regarding equipment. Ideally, a cricket ball is very hard, so hard in fact that they could do damage to an indoor facility. It was also difficult to book time in busy community centres across the area.
They now have a standing agreement to play at St. Dominic Savio Catholic School in Kitchener. As the weather gets nice, Patel says, they are moving from training and pick-up games to more of a league structure with players from around the region and even some from Stratford.
The coach has lots to offer these youngsters, and taking the competition to the next level
is the only way to truly grow the sport.
In fact, Patel is one of the highest certified female coaches in North America. She has already achieved the first two levels of coaching certification from Cricket Australia (which can offer the highest level of certification) and will take the test for her third level shortly. To put this achievement into context, the coach of the Canadian Women’s National Cricket team only has his first level of certification. Playing with the national team and her club teams overseas was a great experience for Patel, but it also opened her eyes to just how far behind Canada is in developing a competitive cricket program. “I have seen what other leagues are like, and it is better than anything we have in Canada.”
Training is a particular issue for Patel, who must train “virtually” via Internet workouts and coaching. The system in place is remarkable considering what was available only a few years earlier, but Patel, still only 24, feels her career is being cut short because she is wearing down physically. “In women’s cricket, you can play until about 30,” she explains. “Do I plan on playing until 30? No. I can tell you, I have terrible shoulders from throwing. We are not given a physio. We pay for all of that ourselves.” That’s where her burgeoning coaching career comes in. It’s a way to stay active in cricket for the rest of her life.
“I live cricket,” she says. “This is not something for Saturday night. I will always be involved in cricket. Whether that’s playing, coaching, watching … though it will probably be all three.” Getting back to Ted Williams’ quote about hitting a baseball being the hardest thing in sport. Hitting a baseball or a cricket ball or any kind of ball at the highest level certainly is tough, but what Patel has achieved as a woman in a traditionally male sport deserves special recognition. And on top of it all, she can punish the ball with the best of them.