Lydia Greenway
Known for her fluent left-hand batting and Olympian fielding, England women’s legend Lydia Greenway retired from international cricket in 2016. She has since taken up residence as Kent women’s head coach, and in January of this year, founded her own coaching initiative, Cricket for Girls Aid development
Your day-to-day work as a coach will depend on what level you’re coaching. At county level, you tend to get a good blend of quality international players, but a lot of young inexperienced girls too. A lot of simple work goes into up-skilling these players, just developing their basic skills a bit further. At Kent, for example, we’re in a bit of a transitional phase at the moment, having lost a lot of our senior players last season, like Charlotte Edwards who’s gone to Hampshire, and with our England players being away. The new breed are keen learners, but it’s important to first cover the essentials of the game. This season, for example, we’ve been putting on extra training sessions geared towards providing match-specific, scenario-based work, so that when the girls get into that real-time situation, they know what they’re trying to achieve.