Australia’s top bowlers facing a spiky challenge which is leading to an increase in ankle injuries
They’re leading the charge at the World T20, but Australia’s women are more susceptible to foot and ankle injuries because they’re being forced to wear men’s shoes several sizes too big.
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Imagine pulling on three pairs of socks just so your shoes will, well, ALMOST fit.
Then try running in and bowling at upwards of 120kmph.
It’s not ideal. But that’s the spiky challenge facing Australia’s best female bowlers as they chase a fourth World T20 title in the Caribbean.
“There’s actually not a female cricket shoe,” Australian women’s team physiotherapist Kate Mahony said.
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“Basically at the moment the (batters) get runners, they take the bottom out of the runners and they get them spiked up — they get spikes put on the bottom of their running shoes.
“Or (bowlers) buy a men’s shoe in a smaller size and some of them aren’t small enough … and then they wear three pairs of socks to make it fit, so we’re getting all these foot and ankle injuries.
“Asics has produced an inner sole for us that fits perfectly into their shoes to fill out some volume … and that’s the best we can do at the moment.”
That’s where it all started for Mahony: a shoe that doesn’t fit.
Mahony is not just the team’s physiotherapist. As Cricket Australia female sports science and medicine co-ordinator, she is also an advocate for her players.
She’s passionate about tailoring all facets of the sport — from fitness training to recovery to mental health to athlete screening — to the female participant.
“The differences for example in the hip width means females get a lot more knee injuries than men, so making sure we’re got good injury prevention programs (is important),” she said.
“We have a concussion policy for men, that just becomes a concussion policy for women … but there’s a group over in Washington called Pink Concussions and they’re doing all this research into female brain injury and they’re showing it does take females longer to get back and we’re not sure why.
“Females tend to get more symptoms for a longer period of time and the education isn’t around it so the coaches expect the girls to be exactly the same as the guys and they’re not, so we need some education of policy around that.
“Often female athletes are very flexible but because they don’t develop the muscle bulk because they don’t have the testosterone that guys do … we often end up with a lot of our players who are hypermobile but they’re not as strong as they need to be so we get a heap of injury around that (like shoulder injuries).”
The 37-year-old from Sydney was recently awarded a Churchill Fellowship and will travel abroad next year researching how best to treat the female athlete.
She’ll visit Japan, Norway, Qatar, the United States and South Africa in her thirst for knowledge.
Mahony will visit a female research centre looking at hormonal patterns and training, Pink Concussion in Washington and also consider research into blood profiling of female athletes.
Mahony lived in London for four years working on the WTA tour.
She continues to run medical services for female players at the Australian Open each January.
“It was all developed for females,” she said of the tennis experience.
“I felt like I came into cricket and it was just like, ‘you can have that because the men have it’, but it wasn’t what we needed sometimes”.
Asics is working with Cricket Australia to produce a female cricket shoe and parties will meet in Sydney at the end of November, but it’s still at least 12 months away.
Imagine the difference a shoe that fits could make.
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Originally published as Australia’s top bowlers facing a spiky challenge which is leading to an increase in ankle injuries
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