New Scorpions coach Luke Williams heralds new era for South Australia’s best female cricketers

As the SA Scorpion cricketers returned to training this week after their off-season breaks, their new head coach Luke Williams reveals his hopes for the upcoming summer of cricket.

• Schutt excited about prospect of donning baggy green

Luke Williams was nine years old when he first picked up his bat and joined a cricket club.

It’s been three decades since then and he’s still involved in the game he loves.

This week, as South Australia’s women’s cricket team returned from the off-season, Williams officially started his role as their newly appointed head coach.

In that capacity he’ll steer not only the SA Scorpions in the Women’s National Cricket League, but the Adelaide Strikers in the Women’s Big Bash League.

Luke Williams addresses the SA Scorpions on day one of their pre-season training. Picture: SARAH REED

He’s taking over the reins of a team that now only has one Australian contracted player remaining (bowler Megan Schutt after Amanda-Jade Wellington lost her contract in April), and one that finished bottom of the ladder in the WNCL and scraped off the bottom in the WBBL.

But that doesn’t faze him.

In fact, the 39-year-old is looking forward to the challenge.

He’s coming into the role well credentialed: An Adelaide Cricket Club life member, Williams is second on the club’s leaderboard for all-time runs with 6984, including a highest score of 253 not out.

He is one of three players to win the Bradman Medal three times (2005-06, 2007-08 and 2009-10), as the best Premier Cricket player of the season.

Williams has been head coach of both the under-15 and under-18 state boys in his former position as talent coordinator in the male pathway space with SACA.

He worked hard to get into coaching as his way of staying involved in the game once his playing days were over. In his early 30s, he took at job at Toll Transport so that he could coach.

“I worked shift work in the mornings — the 5am-1pm shift — and then afterwards I’d do some coaching in the afternoon,” he recalls.

After landing his at SACA in the junior male program, he received a phone call from Andrea McCauley — then head coach of the Scorpions and Strikers — three years ago, asking whether he’d like to take up a temporary assistant coach role at the Strikers for a couple of games.

Newly appointed coach of SA’s state women's cricket team, Luke Williams, is pictured at the Adelaide Oval. Picture: SARAH REED

He said yes and last year, when cricket legend Shelley Nitschke took at national coaching job, Williams was appointed McCauley’s assistant.

Then at the beginning of this year, the unexpected happened: McCauley stepped down as coach despite having a year to go on her contact. He was shocked by her retirement.

“Yes, for sure,” he muses. “I assumed that she would keep going and I was enjoying the opportunity to learn from her and use her experience and knowledge in the women’s game to continue in that assistant role.”

Instead, he now finds himself fast-tracked into the head role at a time when women’s cricket — and more broadly women’s sport — is flourishing.

And you might be surprised by his response as to the differences between male and female cricketers.

“I think people probably don’t appreciate that there’s far, far more similarities than differences … the biggest thing is that it’s still a group and team of athletes who prepare well, who are professional and highly skilled, and who are trying to achieve their personal and team goals,” Williams says.

“I think women’s sport in general has gone from strength to strength and I feel really honoured to be a part of it.”

But this season won’t be without its challenges. Firstly, is the fact that the majority of players in the “Scorps” have only ever been coached by McCauley, who was at the helm of the side for six years and prior to that was in women’s junior development.

As such, she’d been coaching many of the current top level cricketers — including Amanda-Jade Wellington, Tahlia McGrath, Bridget Patterson, Megan Schutt and Tegan McPharlin — since their junior days.

Luke Williams looks on as his players start a 2km time trial around the Adelaide parklands this week. Picture SARAH REED

— Emma de Broughe leads the way as the Scorpions hit Uni Loop for pre-season training. Picture SARAH REED

How will the side go under a new coach with a new perspective and a new regimen?

“It’s going to be a huge challenge for everybody,” Williams says.

“The majority of players have only ever had Andrea as a coach at this level. Our staff, including myself, have only ever worked under Andrea in this program.”

But what will be a bigger challenge for Williams is to get the Scorpions back to the heights of the WNCL table.

Last year, SA finished wooden spooners with only two wins from six games, after being crowned champions in the 2015-16 season.

But Williams says despite the disappointment from a “table point of view” there’s still a lot of good signs to take out from last season, including the debuts of youngsters Ellie Falconer, Eliza Doddrige and Annie O’Neil, while senior players McGrath and Patterson scored their maiden centuries, while Sam Betts took her first “five-for” at state level.

“Consistency is our big-ticket item for us to improve this year,” he says.

“Last season, there were key moments in games that we weren’t able to grasp and we want to continue to develop our skills and our confidence and our decision-making and our tactical awareness to be able to win those key moments in those games.

“That will be the key difference for us where we finish on the ladder this year.”

And he’ll be aiming to get more SA players into national and international roles too and to that end he’s introduced a new “Emerging Scorpions” program, which mirrors the long-running Emerging Redbacks program.

But first, there’s pre-season training to relish and a squad of young hopefuls looking forward to working with him.