Nestled within the picturesque port town of Albany, 2024-25 WA Community Cricket Female Country Volunteer winner Rachel Badger has created an environment for kids of all abilities to thrive when participating in club cricket.<\/p>\n
Born from the desire of creating a safe space for her son to play the game he loves, Rebecca set out to create and organise a team of Star Blasters within the town. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMy son has autism and he was struggling in the normal Master Blasters as it was at the time,\u201d Rachel said. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe asked the question \u2018why there wasn\u2019t anything for kids like him?\u2019 so I sort of went from there and we started up Star Blast here in Albany. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt means that children and families have somewhere to play cricket, they can still play when they wouldn\u2019t be able to before,\u201d Rachel said. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI have families come back every year now because their kids love it so much.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMy son actually still plays and now has dreams to go play in the Integrated Cricket League.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
After running the program for the last seven summers, Rachel said there is one memory that stands out to her which highlights why programs like Star Blast are so important. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI had a little boy start with me and he only preferred the males and by the end of the season he refused to go to anyone else but me and would only play cricket with me,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI took that as a huge win that I was doing something right.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not just spending her time volunteering in Star Blast, Rachel splits her time helping to grow the game for girls and women.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cPretty much anything to do with women\u2019s cricket, I am there and involved in it,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI am one of the coordinators, I do all of the social media, and I run our Sunset Scorchers program.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Having seen girl\u2019s and women\u2019s cricket explode in popularity, Rachel is looking forward to the summer sun cresting over the hills and the sound of cricket balls sounding around the port city soon. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m excited to see it continue to grow and for everyone to get to play the game,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone deserves to play the game and if that means I\u2019m doing the work that\u2019s fine because then I can see kids like my daughter playing cricket.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cKids of all abilities and genders can play, it is just so rewarding at the end of the day to know that we are there for them.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nestled within the picturesque port town of Albany, 2024-25 WA Community Cricket Female Country Volunteer winner Rachel Badger…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143926,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85,83],"class_list":["post-143925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143925\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}