Richard Chee Quee still gets goosebumps when he thinks about it.

Still one of only two players of Chinese heritage to play first-class cricket in Australia, Chee Quee was invited by a young Todd Greenberg – then a development officer at Cricket New South Wales – to run a series of cricket clinics at schools through Sydney’s multicultural south-west in the suburbs of Liverpool, Canley Vale and Cabramatta at the back end of his career.

The catch?

“It was about the second school that we went to, he pulls me aside and he says ‘I just want you to understand that we’re not actually targeting these kids’,” Chee Quee recalls.

“I asked: then what are we doing here? Who are we targeting?’”

Greenberg’s reply? ‘We’re targeting their kids.

“‘These kids here, where their parents have come from, they don’t really know cricket. And their first priority is for them (the kids) to get an education. For them to spend all weekend playing cricket, it’s going to be a tough ask to get them to allow that to happen.

“But if you can make them understand that they look like you and you’ve made a career out of cricket. If you make them enjoy it, then when they have kids, when the choice comes to play cricket, then hopefully they’ll say yes.”

Fast forward to today, and the seeds planted in those clinics are starting to bear fruit.

“To come full circle, there were four parents in my kids’ local school in the inner west who came up to me and said, ‘I was one of those kids in those schools and now my kids are playing cricket,’” he says.

“I get goosebumps just telling you this, but it’s something that I’ve been very passionate about and I guess the older I get the more passionate I become.”

Chee Quee made history in 1992 when he made his Sheffield Shield debut for NSW, joining Hunter Poon as the second player of Chinese heritage to play in Australia’s first-class cricket system.

The fact there hasn’t been another since is something that makes the man known as Cheeks sad.

SEEDS OF CRICKET: A LONG-TERM VISION BEARS FRUIT

There is a nationwide drive to tap into the cricket-mad South Asian (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh) diaspora that exists in the country, but Chee Quee worries that approach has been too tunnel-visioned.

“It’s really important that if we want to be multicultural, then you’ve got to be multicultural,” he says. “You’ve got to be more inclusive particularly of the countries who don’t necessarily play cricket.

“I look at rugby league, rugby union and AFL – the cultures within those sports and there’s absolutely no reason why we can’t tap into that.

“Cricket is our national sport. And if you’re going to be multicultural you’ve got to be more inclusive of other parts (of society).

“India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh are very well represented and we absolutely can’t ignore those areas but I think we need to really focus on other parts of Asia as well, the more eastern parts of Asia.

“Even Europe, Sam Konstas is a great example of somebody that we should be really trying to tap into to expand the game. But also the Pacific Islands – why aren’t we targeting them? Why don’t we have any role models for them?

“I’ve had these discussions with Cricket Australia. I’ve also had these discussions with Cricket New South Wales – that we’ve got an opportunity to be multicultural, to be really inclusive of not just South East Asia but all the other regions around the world as well.”

BEYOND SOUTH ASIA: CRICKET’S CALL FOR TRUE DIVERSITY

The good news is that change seems to be coming.

Last year Cricket NSW launched its South Asian engagement strategy, and off the back of that a working group has been formed and tasked with tapping into the huge South East Asian and East Asian (everything east of the Himalayas) populous that exists in the state.

The key difference in approaches between the two groups – the gospel of the game doesn’t need spreading through the South Asian community, it does for the South East Asian.

“With the South East Asian diaspora cricket is not a game that they would go to right away,” says CNSW community communication specialist Swagata Sen.

“It’s not an inherent part of their consciousness. So what we need to do is build awareness among those communities and that’s how we are approaching it.”

So far that has meant community activations in suburbs with high South East Asian representation, school programs and even working with local baseball teams to tap into the playing base of a sport that has historically been far more popular in the region.

And it’s not just about social posturing either.

In 2020 CNSW set itself the target of doubling the number of registered players it had between the ages of 5-12 from 40,000 to 80,000 by the end of 2026.

Finding new markets is the only way that happens.

“Getting new communities interested in cricket is now our focus because if we don’t do that we can’t get more people. We’ll get the same people coming back every year,” says Sen.

And they’ve got a not-so-secret weapon in their pursuit of these new communities.

A NEW GENERATION’S CRICKET TRAILBLAZER

While there hasn’t been a man of East Asian descent playing for the state since Chee Quee, right now there are two women of Malaysian heritage in the WNCL and Sydney Sixers’ WBBL side.

Both 20 years old, Elsa Hunter and Lauren Kua’s families lived 15 minutes apart in Malaysia but only crossed paths as teenagers in Australia, forging their way on the cricket field.

“I only discovered that there was another South East Asian girl playing cricket when I played under 13s or under 15s for Penrith and I met Lauren Kua, and she’s Malaysian as well,” Hunter says, noting that her mother, Lauren’s father and former NSW pathways player Sara Chun’s mother became fast friends.

“It was nice for me and my mum to see other people who look like us in an environment which doesn’t have many of us.

“Lauren and I were actually from the same part of Malaysia. My uncle lives in a state called Selangor and her family grew up there as well. I was always at my uncle’s place, which was actually around 15 minutes from where Lauren used to live in Malaysia.”

Hunter, who moved from Malaysia to Sydney in 2015 as a 10-year-old is as good an example as you will find of cricket’s ability to foster connections.

Three years on from discovering the sport at the 2015 World Cup when she moved over, Hunter was making history as the youngest international player ever as a 13-year-old with Malaysia. She still plays for her nation of birth, but harbours dreams of donning Aussie gold one day.

“I was just grateful to move to Australia because it’s such a beautiful country, but school was different,” she says. “There weren’t many Asian kids in my area – Leonay, which is near Penrith – there were one or two other Asian kids so I felt like an outsider when I first moved here.”

It was at the cricket club across the road from her house that she found a home.

“Cricket was different – it’s just something about it. I never felt different from everyone else there. I just felt like one of the boys – they even voted me to become captain one of the years when I was 12.”

TAPPING INTO SOUTH EAST ASIAN TALENT

The home she found at Emu Plains Cricket Club has echoes of the one the Chee Quee brothers, Richard and his older brother Michael, found at Randwick Cricket Club – now Randwick-Petersham – back in the day.

“We were the only Asian kids in our cricket club and we were the only Asian kids in our school,” he says.

“But we didn’t really know any different. We were lucky that our parents allowed us to assimilate into society in the way that we grew up – we grew up not speaking English, but we grew up speaking Australian. We really considered ourselves as Australian – by the way we acted and by the way we felt.

“But it was only when we occasionally looked in the mirror that we realised that we’re actually different. So cricket was a vehicle for us to also assimilate – we used soccer in the winter and cricket during the summer.

“We copped our fair share of being bullied at school because we were different, we got basically ridiculed because of the colour of our skin and because of the way we looked.

“But I don’t look back on those times with nothing more than it was just learning and growing.”

Like Hunter said, things were different at cricket.

“Obviously today we’re a lot more politically correct but the Aussie way was to be able to take the mickey out of yourself,” says Chee Quee.

“Within our walls at Randwick Cricket Club, we would be the butt of the jokes occasionally, but we would also give it back to ourselves.

“But if anybody from outside our walls tried to take the mickey out of us because of our culture, you’d have 20-30 blokes jumping down their skin protecting us.”

A natural on social media, fluent in multiple languages, and most importantly an uber-talented cricketer passionate about getting more players who look like her into the game, Hunter’s rise could be the ultimate catalyst to getting more SEA athletes playing cricket.

Already, she is helping CNSW and the Sixers tap into the new target market.

In February, the Sixers hosted a Chinese New Years event in Burwood, pushing the fact the women’s team would be playing matches at North Sydney Oval – less than 30 minutes away.

For the event, they handed out flyers in red packets – red envelopes typically filled with money or gifts for Lunar New Year, weddings and birthdays.

“These grandmas were kind of just coming up to our tent and stealing our red packets, so I had to step in in Cantonese” she laughs.

“I was like ‘grandma these are our red packets, we bought them ourselves’, and then she was like, ‘oh, the company didn’t buy it for you?’

“I said, ‘No, no, we bought them ourselves.

“And she was like ‘Oh, OK, what are you guys selling here?’

“So then I got to actually pitch to her what cricket was about and lucky enough she had a 12-year-old grandson and she was like, ‘I’ll pass this on to him and see if he’s interested.’”

Two days before this interview Hunter was at a Sixers appearance at Penshurst Public School and the target audience was very much the kids there.

She says: “About 75 to 80 per cent of the kids were actually of Asian background which was really cool because usually when I’m up there and I introduce myself I say, ‘hey guys, I’m Elsa. I’m from Malaysia.’ And I go, ‘Who here has heard of Malaysia?’ And usually not many people put their hand up.

“At this school I had like 80-90 per cent of them go ‘me me me’. I was like oh my god that is so cute.

“When we were doing the cricket blast outside after a lot of the little South East Asian girls who were from Malaysia would come up to me and go ‘oh I’m from Malaysia, my parents are from Malaysia too’, and it was just really nice to see them and they were actually doing really well at the activities.”

Only 20 years old, Hunter knows how big a role she can have in bringing new people to the game of cricket simply by playing at the highest level – “If I had someone that was similar to me growing up, I would have been like ‘oh, we can do it too’.

“So it’s really important that I just keep going out there and promoting the sport and telling girls that are similar to me that they can do it if they want to.”

The same can be said of rising NSW keeper Alex Lee-Young, Chinese through his father’s side, who has been a regular for Australia’s Under 19s team for the past year.

“I don’t know if I will be (a role model),” Lee-Young says, “but I’d love to be and it’s definitely something I’m trying to work towards every day.

“That’d be a dream come true, not only to represent New South Wales or anything higher, but just have any influence on any South East Asian people – that would be pretty rewarding.”

ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER: INSPIRING CRICKET’S FUTURE

For Chee Quee, it was a realisation that came much later in his playing career – in the departures lounge of Sydney Airport of all places talking to the late Dean Jones.

“We struck up a little conversation, which was really nice, and he said: ‘I really want you to meet my business partner,’” he recalls.

The business partner was a man by the name of Jonathan Chan.

“I said, ‘g’day, mate. Nice to meet you’.

“And he said, ‘g’day mate, nice to meet you Cheeks.’

“And he spoke to me in such an Aussie accent, but we looked the same. And it was the first time that dawned on me that ‘oh my god, so that’s what people see.

“And it really hit me between the eyes – that’s the uniqueness that people see. Up until that day I probably didn’t really understand it or get it. I remember that moment like it was yesterday.

“It was from then on that I realised you know that ‘you’ve got an opportunity to do something here’ which I’m proud to say that I continue to do today.”

For this summer, Lee-Young has transferred to Randwick-Petersham – a club where Chee Quee remains a part of the fabric.

Before the move, Chee Quee actually pulled Lee-Young aside at NSW training to tell him how good the club was, unaware of the rising star’s ancestry.

Chee Quee played the last of his 45 games for NSW in 1998, nine years before Lee-Young was born, back when the young gun’s own father was turning heads simply by playing the game. To put it simply, Chee Quee was very much before his time.

Still, the enormity of meeting a trailblazer like Chee Quee was not lost on him.

“It’s just like meeting any hero,” Lee-Young recalls. “It doesn’t feel real. But then you kind of come back to reality, and you get to have a conversation with him and it’s awesome.

“A lot of my friends have compared me to him, you know, in a joking manner, and Dad’s talked about him a bit. He loves him. I remember when I spoke to him, (Dad) had 100 questions for me (about Chee Quee), which I didn’t really know the answers to.”

Of all the clinics Chee Quee ran back in the day, the ones that stand out the most were about actions rather than words.

“They called it the rainbow class because none of the kids in the rainbow class could actually speak English or Australian,” he recalls. “So just through using our actions of how to play cricket, how to catch, how to bat, how to bowl it was probably the most rewarding session that I’ve ever done.

“They were so enthusiastic and they just wanted to copy you. It was just so rewarding to see the looks in their faces when they were able to achieve something.

“That was 30 years ago. So, I’m hoping that if they’ve gone on to have kids, that cricket is certainly at the top of the tree when it comes to the choice of sport.”

Actions over words – that’s what it’s always been about for Chee Quee.

Last year he became a multicultural ambassador for Cricket Australia. It’s something he says he was honoured by. But at the same time, it’s not an honorific he needed.

“It doesn’t just start now that I’ve become a multicultural ambassador – I’ve been doing that every day of my life – with and without knowing.”