Finally free to express herself
Sharne Mayers no longer hides her true feelings behind a smile
Sharne Mayers smiles a lot when she's playing cricket, and when people ask her why, her response is: "Because I am happy to be here." The former Zimbabwe women’s captain is happiest when she is playing cricket and sharing the sport she loves.
This article is brought to you by FRDM, a taste of Africa.
Human beings are strivers. It is through striving for goals, dreams, ambitions, ideals and other stuff that they find fulfilment. Without something to strive for, their lives are empty. Sharne Mayers has always strived to be the best cricketer she could be.
Given the time, Sharne’s parents understood that the goal that she was striving for was not impossible, but it was very difficult to attain. Everyone involved knew that this was not going to be easy, but who is to say if everyone understood just how difficult it was? Well, maybe Sharne would have been too young to understand it all, but her parents and teachers surely knew that this was a tough road that she had chosen.
But, her parents knew better than to try and stop her. She had given up hockey, a sport that she was very good at, choosing cricket instead. So, they did their best to equip her for it, and did all they could to support her on her journey.
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At some point, Sharne just stopped telling her parents about some of the things that happened at away games. And when she did tell them stuff, she made sure that it was mostly the kind of stuff that they had taught her deal with or work around.
It's a decision she made because she was afraid that despite their unwavering support and belief in her, they might reach a breaking point sooner than she did. In any case, their support and guidance all along was meant to prepare her for these kinds of moments. So she made a call, maybe it was now time when she had to look at the alternatives: herself, her sister and her teachers. And what she couldn't deal with, she left alone.
Sometimes some things didn't need resolution.
It really wasn't easy being the only girl in a team with 10 boys. As she grew older and developed more as a young woman, comments grew more menacing, more threatening, especially from older boys. They went from, 'Are you sure you're a girl?' to 'We have to check your body to make sure that you are really a girl.' They went from, 'Why is a girl in the team?' to, 'You're only in the team to service the boys so that they can perform better.'
"It was hard to feel safe or as if I belonged in cricket," Sharne recalls. "A lot of very sexualized jokes were being thrown around. As a woman you become very self-conscious and hyper-aware of things that are happening around you."
Cricket has a history of failing those that do not fit into the nice and pristine little boxes of ideal cricketers. Sharne came with two issues, she is of mixed race and - probably the biggest issue - she is female. The clue why that is a bigger problem than race is in the way that it is described. Soccer is touted as ‘the beautiful game’, on the other hand, cricket is touted as the ‘gentleman’s game.’ Young girls do not grow up to become gentlemen, it is young boys who do. So there was no space for a young girl in the sport.
From as early as 12 years old there were people who had a problem with a girl playing cricket. It sounds odd, because at that time there really isn't much difference, but it happened. One parent made it a point to complain to teachers and coaches that having Sharne on the field was making a farce out of cricket.
"We can't take cricket seriously because you are letting a girl play,” the parent had complained.
It seemed lost on the parent that at this stage, all the kids wanted was to have a bit of fun. They just wanted to enjoy the sport that they loved, and for some, it was an opportunity to be part of the team, to be part of something bigger than themselves.
12-year-old Sharne might not have thought of it much or understood some of the remarks, but older Sharne did. A lot of those comments and the names she was called hurt her, and they still hurt. You can see it as she relives the moments.
At the time, though, there was nothing she could do about it. The best response she could muster then was either an expressionless face or a smile. She couldn't allow any other emotions to come to the surface. So she bottled them up. And when it hurt too much, she cried in private, away from people.
Finding a place and moments of solitude to cry was not difficult, being the only girl in a boys team, she was alone a lot of the time.
"Off the field it was really isolating," she says. Her parents couldn't always travel with her, so they did their best to teach her to be 'self-sufficient'.
“At one point it was me and another parent. She would come along on away matches to watch her son, and often the school asked her to kind of be a chaperon for me. Just so if I would have a female there for me if there was a problem."
It was not ideal, but everyone had to make the best out of the situation. Cricket was a dream that Sharne was determined to pursue. The bare minimum had to be sufficient.
"You have to learn at a very young age to be independent. You learn very early on to be prepared for anything. Things can't go wrong because you have no one."
Things didn't change much when she got called up to the national team at 14. In fact, that is where she learnt to take care of herself, be comfortable with being alone and find ways to take advantage of that 'alone time.'
"In the senior women's set up you don't have your mother or father around to look after you. You have to take care of yourself. That was great preparation for me to play with the boys because I was used to taking care of myself," she recalls.
It's a lot to ask for from a 14-year-old, and Sharne Mayers handled it well. She probably handled things way better than the boys to whom she consistently had to prove herself to. Hell, many would have given up multiple times over.
"You get hurt, and you can't be overly emotional because the stereotypical comments would be thrown about. So you learn to push down whatever emotion you felt because you're a girl in a boys team. You really can't be seen as emotional. You have to be 10 times better at dealing with pain and emotions."
But, now she no longer has to prove herself to anyone and there's no need to pretend that it doesn't hurt. Times are different, she is also a different person now - older, wiser.
As she grew older, Sharne realized that suppressing emotions was not the way to go. Instead of making things better, it made them worse. In fact, Sharne confesses that was angry and aggressive a lot of the time because of all the bottled up emotions.
So, she now freely expresses herself, a luxury she really couldn't afford in the past. Expressing anger, frustration, pain - to shout, to cry and to even throw a tantrum - things she didn't and couldn't do. If she did, it would have been used against her. She would have fallen into a trap, conforming to the stereotype that women are emotional. Overly emotional.
The irony of it all is that while she kept her emotions hidden, tucked away from full view, the boys she played against did express emotions, a lot. Some threw tantrums. And it was okay - they were just being passionate about the game they loved deeply.
When she was 16 they travelled to this boys boarding school, one of Zimbabwe's finest schools. The school has a rich cricketing history, and has produced many international cricketers. As they got off the bus, there was this lady, a parent to one of the boys in the home team. She was standing a few meters closer to the bus.
"Oh shame, it seems like the other team were short of players, so that's why they brought a girl," the parent remarked.
This was the standard response at the majority of schools where they travelled to when people noticed Sharne. There was no mistaking her for a boy, even in tracksuits. But someone should have taught the woman about judging books from their covers and all that. The girl she was mocking, this 'extra player' in the team to make the numbers had been captain of the second XI the previous year. She was more than good.
"I scored 87," she smiles. "I top scored, in that game."
It doesn't help matters that she got most of her runs off the bowling of that parent's son. She really took a liking to his bowling. Sharne had no idea of that fact while she was batting. It was just a happy coincidence.
"He just bowled in my arc, it didn't matter what he tried. Whatever he bowled, I was like, I'm attacking you."
The young man left the field in a state. Sharne had destroyed him. It was bad enough that he had been the most expensive bowler. The fact that the majority of the runs he had conceded were off the batting of a girl just made everything much much worse.
He cried. Then he became upset and started throwing a tantrum. His mother approached the coaches to complain, she too was in a state.
"This is a joke. Who the hell is she? She is making a joke of this. She is taking the place of a boy," the woman was furious.
In a space of an innings, the parent had gone from, 'Oh shame not enough players so they brought a girl,' to 'she has no right to play because she is taking up space.'
"I was so heartbroken that I had scored one of my best knocks and this woman was mad because I had dispatched her son's bowling. And because I had done that, he is now going to get bullied and it was my fault," Sharne shrugs.
The saddest thing about that moment was not that the boy was free to express his emotions and would not be judged for it. Rather, it was that his mother was the one to suggest that Sharne didn't belong in the sport because she was a girl. How a woman would fail to empathize with a young girl doing well in a male dominated space is simply unfathomable.
The woman was repeating what Sharne had been told throughout her cricketing career: that there was no space for a girl in cricket. There was no space for her, Sharne Mayers, in the sport that she loved so much and had dedicated her life to.
“When we went to play away matches, and we had to sleep overnight,” says Sharne, “most schools would tell us that they had only prepared accommodation for the boys and they had nothing for the girl - me. And they would just leave it at that. They made no attempt to accommodate me at all. I would then have to make plans of my own to find a place to sleep at night. My parents often made numerous calls and asked a lot of favors.”
Sharne dealt with this woman’s reaction in the same way she dealt with every other nasty comment, snide remark, name-calling that happened to her. She took it as sledging. Once she did that, it became meaningless in the moment.
"I always told myself, think of it as sledging. It is the worst form of sledging you can say to anyone. If there is a line that you should not cross when sledging, what they said crossed that line by many many meters," Sharne comments. "But I made it that way, so that I could use it as motivation. So my mindset was, you can sledge all you want, but I will bat on and keep playing cricket."
Besides handling her emotions and taking care of herself at a very young age, also walked away from that period of her life with other positives. She is good at doing that, finding silver linings. For instance, when she speaks of her time with the Zimbabwe women's national team, she doesn't dwell much on the negatives - with missing out on playing at the ODI World Cup because Zimbabwe was suspended, in the top 3. Instead, she focuses on the good times, the great relationships she managed to build with a great group of committed women.
She has a similar outlook when reliving her teenage years. After all, it wasn't all bad. She also has some wonderful memories off the field. For instance, when she looks back on the difficult times travelling as the only girl in a boys' team, she is quick to add that her teammates went out of their way to make her feel as a part of the team.
"Some schools wouldn't have a change-room for ladies, especially the all-boys boarding schools," says Sharne. "I remember the one time we travelled an hour and a half to play a cricket match in the morning and all the men's toilets were open and not a single women's toilet was open. And my teammates took it upon themselves to inspect all the toilets, and check if there were any unoccupied ones. After they found one, they secured it for me to use as my changeroom and toilet."
The boys would stand outside and wait for me to use the bathroom and make sure no one came near it while Sharne was using it.
Such memories help, without them she would be a different person. That's why she searches for silver linings. She has an understanding of the fact that while bad things that others do against you hurt, focusing on them creates a deeper kind of hurt. It does things to you, it makes you bitter, cynical and a not entirely great individual. However, acknowledging them and finding positive ways of moving on while celebrating the good moments makes you a more empathetic person. It also teaches you gratitude.
This what probably made her the perfect captain for the Zimbabwe women’s team and why she is a valuable senior voice in the Gauteng dressing-room.
So, instead of focusing on the number of times aggressive 16 and 17-year-old boys hit her on the ribs or targeted her body, she looks at the positives. She became a way better player of the pull shot because of those experiences. In a weird way, she has them to thank for not going easy on her.
"The boys became pretty aggressive with their bowling from around 14, 15, 16," says Sharne.
That is the stage that most girls who had stayed on playing cricket after primary school stepped away. It was only a few of them that did, anyway. Many would go off to the big all-girls schools where there was no cricket and excelled in other sports. The few that stayed on did not think the risk was worth taking. If, like Sharne, you refused to change track and chose to stay on, then you had to learn how to adapt. And you had to be quick about your learning too.
"I adopted the mindset that if you to try to break my helmet, well, watch me pull. Hockey means my stick work is quick, so I will pull you for four, and if I can't pull, watch me get out of the way because tennis taught me good foot movement. If you want to bounce me, well, you only get one chance in each over, so I will watch out for that one."
And it's not just the pull shot that she credits to playing against strong and aggressive boys. Her power-hitting is another thing she developed during those years.
"I have both boys and girls that I teach," Sharne took up a teaching and coaching post after leaving Zimbabwe. She left in a huff, frustrated at the lack of international matches, after Zimbabwe’s suspension by the ICC because of government interference, it was all a little too much. At the time she was in the form of her life and was not willing to let it go to waste. For a brief moment it felt like everything that she had worked so hard for was crumbling down before her eyes.
So, she made the move from Zimbabwe to South Africa, where she is teaching, umpiring hockey games and playing cricket. That workload has not affected her form, she is still playing some of her best cricket.
"So, I have these kids in my classes, and some of these boys that I teach are head and shoulders taller than me - a lot of them are in awe of my power-hitting," Sharne smiles. "They constantly come up to me and say, 'Ma'am you can bat. I watched you on YouTube, how can you hit so hard?'"
This is a conversation that would not have happened just five years ago. Not many boys would have given women's cricket a minute of their time. But now there is a growing appreciation of it, maybe tentative in some areas, but it's there. The girls have a very different reality.
"I get these girls coming up to me to say, 'Ma'am I want to bat like you. I want to be as good as you," says Sharne.
That's different from Sharne at the same age. There were no streaming services back then, no one cared enough to upload matches on YouTube and there were no matches on TV. So girls were inspired by male cricketers.
"The other day my Grade 6 teacher reminded me - she remembers it very clearly. She's like, 'You said you're going to be an international cricketer and play with Andy Flower and Heath Streak.'"
How that would have worked is a mystery. See, Sharne was a wicketkeeper-batter, same as Andy Flower. In fact Andy Flower was whom the player she modelled her cricket after, she knew all there was to know about him. So, between them, who would have given up the gloves?
Today if young girls are inspired by male cricketers, it's not because there is no representation, it's just a choice - which is good. Women haven’t had much of a choice despite the fact that they have been playing cricket for a while now. The first Test match between women’s teams was in 1934, the first women’s ODI was in 1973 and the first ever women’s T20 was in 2004.
Today’s youngsters talk about Dane van Niekerk, Marizanne Kapp, Sophie Ecclestone, Alysa Healy, Mithali Raj, Chamari Athapathu and countless others. And, no one tells them that they do not belong in the sport. It's not the same world as that of Sharne's youth. As the women's game gathers traction, it matters less the sex of the player, but whether one is a quality cricketer or not. And that makes Sharne smile.
She does a lot of that these days, but in a different context. She smiles because she made it further than many thought she would go with cricket, she has proven a lot of doubters wrong. She smiles because she made it through emotionally difficult periods with little damage. She smiles because she is sharing the game she loves with many more young women, a lot of whom she is helping to grow.
She smiles because she no longer has to hide her true feelings behind a smile. She smiles at her freedom to express herself. And she smiles because she can now share her cricket experiences with her parents without self-censoring.
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