Brisbane Heat: Delissa Kimmince’s triumph over personal tragedy
Brisbane Heat player Delissa Kimmince’s faced some darks days after a tragic accident but she credits her cricket family with leading her back to the field. Read her inspiring story.
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Delissa Kimmince looks out over the emerald carpet of the Allan Border Field in Brisbane’s Albion, and smiles.
It’s not hard, she says, to see herself as a 13-year-old girl walking across that expanse, as young and green as the grass beneath her feet.
And what she sees is a slight and shy teenager dragging her cricket kit behind her, with her whole future ahead of her.
It didn’t, she says, go exactly to plan.
Now 30 years old, Kimmince was something of a teen prodigy, the all-rounder making the under-17 Queensland squad at only 13, then batting and bowling her way through the ranks to join the Australian side at 18 years old.
“I’ve been coming to this ground for so long, it feels like a home away from home,” Kimmince, who currently plays for the Women’s Big Bash League’s (WBBL) Brisbane Heat, the Konica Minolta Queensland Fire and the Australian Women’s Cricket teams, says.
“I can see me walking out on to this field as a kid, and I really was just a kid with no clue what was ahead of me.”
Because after her blazing start in the game, with the teenager from the Darling Downs town of Warwick being labelled “one to watch” in national cricket circles, by the time Kimmince was 19 years old, it was all over.
“The only way I can really describe it now is that I completely fell apart,” Kimmince says, as she looks across the field and sees that slight, fair-haired, young girl leaving the pitch, her innings over.
“It’s a bit of a story how I came to love the game again,” Kimmince smiles, “but all the girls on the team have a story.”
MEET THE HEAT
When the Brisbane Heat stroll out on to the Allan Border field next week for their penultimate match of the 2019/2020 season against the Melbourne Renegades, they will do so as reigning champions.
BRISBANE HEAT RE-SIGN GRACE HARRIS
Last year was a banner year for the Heat, snatching the competition’s trophy from New South Wales’s Sydney Sixers, for the first time since the WBBL started in 2015.
In the stands, a growing number of fans reflects the rising popularity of women’s cricket, with the Heat’s game against the Adelaide Strikers in Mackay in January this year attracting a record crowd of almost 6000.
For the grand final game against the Sixers, 479,000 viewers tuned into Fox Sports or the Seven network to watch the match, with the audience number peaking at 812,000 viewers, according to Queensland Cricket. The Heat, it seems, have never been hotter, and the competition to join its ranks has never been fiercer.
Many members of the 15-strong Heat squad also play for Queensland, and three are members of the current Australian team (Kimmince, Beth Mooney, 25, and Jess Jonassen, 26).
But all of them have stories to tell of what it took to don the distinctive teal blue colours of the Heat; or the Queensland Fire’s maroons and yellows; or the coveted baggy green cap.
The women hail from the city and the bush, from inner-city Brisbane to dusty pitches in Charters Towers, Rockhampton, Mackay and Hervey Bay.
Many grew up in places where there was no women’s cricket to speak of; where they were instead offered spots on their brothers’ or fathers’ teams, and where some of them faced resistance about their right to play at all.
Most of these women have full-time jobs outside cricket. They are nurses (Laura Harris, 29) and school principals (Kirby Short, 32) and landscape gardeners (Sammy-Jo Johnson, 27) and lawyers (Jonassen).
Apart from the Australian team, where the minimum annual retainer for a player is currently $72,076, semi-professional women’s cricket just doesn’t pay enough for a decent living, and so they juggle their training times and games around work commitments.
For the youngest member of the team, 16-year-old Charli Knott, a Year 11 student at Brisbane State High, it means juggling her sport around end-of-year exams and assignments.
All of which means these women have earned their place in the Heat, and none more so than Kimmince, and Sammy-Jo Johnson, 27, two of the most talented players on the team, and two of the most resilient off it.
And both say that the game saved them.
LEAVING THE FIELD
It was a particularly shocking accident, one that took the lives of four young people from Warwick – Abby Ezzy, 17, Max Thorley, 18, Nick Nolan, 20, and Brett McKenzie, 20.
On January 5, 2008, the four friends were leaving a birthday party when their car and a semi-trailer collided on the Cunningham Highway about 11km from the regional Queensland town, 155km southwest of Brisbane.
It was the sort of tragedy that resulted in thousands of people turning out for the funerals, the sort of funerals where local football clubs formed guards of honour, and the sort of whole-town mourning where everyone knew someone involved somehow. For Delissa Kimmince, then 18 years old, it was devastating.
“They were all mates of mine, they weren’t my best mates but they were good mates,” she says. “I knew them all and I grew up with them all, and they were all really good people.
“In a small country town like Warwick, the ripple effect was overwhelming. It was the saddest time, and for lots of people who were there at the time, it was very hard to come to terms with.”
Many didn’t, including Kimmince.
“I fell into this deep well of depression. At the time I was in the Australian team, and I just couldn’t face going back to Warwick, so I moved permanently to Brisbane, which in hindsight was not the right move.
“I was away from my family and close friends, I really struggled to get a job, and I was just very lonely, I suppose.”
She was also holding on to a secret, one that she could not countenance telling her somewhat conservative family, one that she had kept to herself for years.
“I knew I was gay, but small towns and gay people didn’t really mix in 2008, and I couldn’t find the words somehow.”
Staying silent, and the deaths of her friends, led Kimmince to struggle.
“It really affected me, and I really thought about not making it through the night several times.”
During this time, Kimmince played in the Cricket World Cup in Sydney, a competition she should have felt thrilled to be in. Instead, she says she felt nothing.
“I wasn’t excited to be there, I wasn’t proud, I wasn’t anything at all.”
By 20 years old, she was “done”.
“I walked away from everything from cricket, my family and my friends, as far as I could.’’
Kimmince moved to London in March 2011, couch surfing at mates’ houses, pulling pints in a pub, getting “the old Heathrow injection” (the phrase given to putting on the pounds when moving to London) from drinking too much and not playing cricket.
“What’s that saying?” Kimmince muses, “your biggest mistakes are your best mistakes.”
“I don’t think I was the fittest I’d ever been in London, but it gave me a bit of distance, and I stopped being so shy, and I think I just allowed myself to have a bit of fun.”
She also, after a little bit of encouragement, picked up a bat again, playing for Warwickshire and rediscovering her love of the game.
“There were no expectations on me, I was just playing for the joy of it. What that taught me was appreciation versus expectation, which is really handy in cricket, because it taught me to accept the game itself and all its frustrations.
“It doesn’t matter who you are, in cricket you are going to have those days when everything goes wrong and those days when everything goes right.”
Everything started going right again for Kimmince when she returned home to Queensland in 2012, and returned to Queensland Cricket in 2013, the game welcoming her back with open arms.
In 2014, she played in the International Cricket Council (ICC) World T20 tournament in Bangladesh, and in 2015 was awarded the captaincy of the Queensland Fire.
Kimmince was also the inaugural captain of the Heat (currently Kirby Short has the top job) and in April 2018, she was named part of the Australian squad.
“None of that would have happened without the support I got during the hard times from my own family (father, Peter, 58, mother Suellen, 55, and brothers Matthew, 22 and James, 26) and from my cricketing family.
“When I was going through my darkest times, our team psychologist Michael Lloyd (currently the Cricket Australia sports psychologist) spoke to me all the time.
“I would cry and cry and cry and he would listen and listen and listen, and helped me out of the dark.’’
These days, Kimmince’s life is full of light, and love.
Newly engaged to Heat teammate Laura Harris, 29, the couple had been dating for four years before Kimmince proposed.
“I asked her over a glass of wine, and a cheese platter. I read her a poem I had written, we both cried, and then she went to work, and I went to sleep!”
Harris and Kimmince will marry in the Queensland country town of Marburg in July next year, with the blessings and good wishes of both their families.
“I am happy to tell my story because I know what it is to think you will never, ever get better.
“So I want to say that if you are all the way down there, it’s worth taking a risk.
“If you just do something instead of nothing, for me it was going to London, but it could be anything, something different from what you are currently doing, you might just get out.”
THE COMEBACK KID
Sammy-Jo Johnson sat on a beach at North Stradbroke Island at the end of last year’s WBBL season, staring at the sea. Beside her was her husband Brian, 35, and a smattering of cricket mates. Johnson looked at Straddie’s perfect, curling waves and thought: “I am so bloody grateful”.
“It was this moment of sitting there with my husband, and these friends I play cricket with, who are all such good people and I thought about all the hard work and all the shit and all the tears I’d been through, and how I’d come out the other side.”
Like Kimmince, Johnson, an all-rounder who plays for the Australia A squad, the Queensland Fire (and was named the 2017-18 Queensland Fire Player of the Year and Player’s Player), the Brisbane Heat and the Gold Coast Dolphins in the Katherine Raymont Shield, has known the darkest of hours.
Hers is a story of a sports-mad kid who went to six different schools and excelled at soccer and hockey before settling on cricket, of playing in all-men’s teams when she was only a girl; of living in housing commission homes on struggle streets, and of a beloved father struggling behind closed doors with severe mental illness.
It is also somewhat unexpectedly – certainly for Johnson – a story of a timely encounter with former Australian cricket captain Adam Gilchrist’s parents, Stan and June Gilchrist.
Johnson smiles.
“Stan and June changed everything for me.”
In Year 8, Johnson had moved with her family – father Robert, mother Teena and younger sisters Rikki-Leigh, and Montana) back to their hometown of Lismore in New South Wales.
She’d had a somewhat peripatetic childhood, living and playing cricket around Victoria’s Albury-Wodonga, where she was the only girl to make her school’s Under-12s team.
In Lismore, she also played in her local (otherwise all-male) club, and as part of the men’s team in 2008, as a 16-year-old, she took part in a charity match.
It would, as she said, change everything.
That day, she dismissed the former Australian cricketer Michael Bevan, and in the crowd watching were Stan and June Gilchrist, Lismore locals who liked what they saw in the freckle-faced girl facing off against the big guns.
From that day on, the couple took a quiet interest in Johnson, and in 2009 Johnson received an email offering her an Adam Gilchrist Scholarship to play a season of cricket in England, which she took up the following year.
It was, for Johnson, the most golden of summers, playing for a club in the Lakes District, training every day, making lifelong friends and taking a handy 60 wickets on the field.
Returning home, Johnson first played grade cricket in Lismore for a couple of seasons, but in 2012 moved to Brisbane to try her luck north of the border.
For the next two years Johnson made her mark in Queensland cricket, joining the Queensland Fire and earning a reputation as a hard worker who would do just about anything to keep her place.
She and Brian lived in a caravan park, saving on rent, with Sammy-Jo supplementing her cricketing income by tending the grounds at the Allan Border Field.
It was a steady rise through the ranks, followed, like Kimmince, by a spectacular fall.
“I was Dad’s girl”, Johnson says quietly. “He really did love all of us so much, but he had some pretty big mental health issues for most of our lives, and general health issues, which just robbed him of everything.”
Johnson’s father Robert battled with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and drug addiction. The once proud family man and truck driver had tried everything to beat the demons that raged inside him – electric shock therapy, psychiatric and psychological treatment, rehab and going cold turkey.
“He was in and out of jobs and in out of jail, he tried everything, but it was not enough.”
On July 23, 2012, at aged 44, Robert Johnson took his own life. Johnson, then 19, “fell apart”.
“It was just … black,” she says. “It was just the whole family fragmenting.
“I went down the party road, I associated with people who were into drugs and alcohol, and I did a lot of stupid shit. I just wanted to forget everything.”
Except cricket. Even during her darkest periods, she kept playing “here and there”, although no longer with the Queensland team.
“Cricket gave me a glimmer of hope, a glimpse into what I might be, and it made me see a way out of the hole we had all got ourselves into.
“Mum was in a bad way, my sister was in with the wrong crowd, my youngest sister Montana was not in good place and she was just a little girl.
“She was only about nine, and I realised that it was up to me to get us all out of the hole, for her sake.”
For Johnson, the party was over. It was time to clean up the mess.
“I just started training really hard, taking my cricket really seriously and changing my own habits.”
Her hard work paid off, in 2015 she was once again selected for the Fire.
Johnson credits former Brisbane Heat and Queensland Fire coaches Andy Richards and Peter McGiffin, as well as current assistant coach Scott Prestwidge for her return to form, both on and off the field.
“They never gave up on me, and cricket never gave up on me.”
Neither did husband Brian, with whom she now runs a Brisbane based-landscape gardening and lawn maintenance business “B and S Lawn Care”. Last year, her sister Montana, 17, graduated from high school, Rikki-Leigh is now 25, and a mother of three, and Teena Johnson, 49, helps out at B and S Lawn Care.
All three, Johnson says, are doing “really well”. As for herself, Johnson says she’s aiming for a move from the Australia A to the Australian squad.
“Part of me wants to do it for the honour of representing your country, but a big part of me wants to do it for other kids like me, to show that there’s always a way out of whatever hole you’ve found yourself in.”
NOT JUST SCHOOLYARD CRICKET
Charli Knott wants to play for Australia too, actually, she wants to be the best female cricket player in the world. And those who have seen the 16-year-old right-hand batter and off-spinner in action know that there’s every chance she will be.
Knott moved from Mackay to Brisbane in 2014 to further her cricket career, and is now the youngest member of the Brisbane Heat.
Knott says most of her classmates at Brisbane State High have “no clue” she plays cricket semi-professionally.
“They’d probably be pretty surprised actually,” Knott, who lives with her mother, Jo, 46, an accountant, father Brendan, 43, a fireman, older sister Alanah, 27, and twin sister Hanna, says.
“I’m pretty quiet at school, I’m not in the popular group at all.
“I don’t think people really notice me.”
They’re certainly taking notice of her in cricket circles, with Knott’s calm demeanour when facing down players much older than she is earning her plaudits wherever she plays with the Heat, or trains, as she also does, with the Fire.
Knott was a soccer player first, but took up cricket in the off season, her dad “throwing me balls, pretty hard” in their Mackay back yard.
Knott made the Queensland Under-12s team before moving to Brisbane, where she now juggles her schoolwork with the Heat’s heavy training schedule.
“I try to get up really early to do an hour or so of homework, then I catch the train, or Dad takes me, from South Bank to Albion, and then I walk to training four nights a week.”
Throw in the games on weekends and away games with the Heat, and it’s clear that Knott is, like her teammates Kimmince and Johnson, made of strong stuff.
All the Brisbane Heat women are. It takes all sorts of stories to reach the top in women’s cricket, pad up, and beat all sorts of odds.
Call Lifeline on 131 114 or visit lifeline.org.au
UPCOMING MATCHES WBBL
Wednesday, November 27: Heat v Melbourne Renegades, Allan Border Field, Albion, Brisbane 1.10pm
Sunday, December 1: Heat v Melbourne Stars, Junction Oval, St Kilda, Melbourne 2.00pm
UPCOMING MATCHES
KONICA MINOLTA QUEENSLAND FIRE
Tuesday, 7 January 2020: ACT v Qld Fire, Blacktown International SportsPark2, Sydney, 9am
Thursday, 9 January 2020: NSW v Qld Fire, Blacktown International SportsPark, Sydney, 9am
Tuesday, 21 January 2020: ACT v Qld Fire, Manuka Oval, Canberra, 9am
Wednesday, 22 January 2020: NSW v Qld Fire, Manuka Oval, Canberra, 9am
Tuesday, 4 February 2020: Qld Fire v Victoria, Allan Border Field, 10am
Thursday, 6 February 2020: Qld Fire v SA, Allan Border Field, 10am
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