Aimee Rees is so integral to Welsh women’s and girls’ cricket, that two years ago the governing bodies realised that without her work as a tireless volunteer it was likely the entire programme would collapse.
Rees began playing cricket 30 years ago when only three girls played across the whole of South Wales, and now leads a programme of 330 female players in the country. She played in the first Wales international match, and has volunteered in the game for over twenty years, running it almost on her own. It’s hard to work out where Rees ends and cricket begins, but it is clear that neither could live without the other.
Her introduction to cricket came as a baby, watching her father Ray play for a civil service team in Morriston, Swansea. “I used to go along to dad’s cricket and I would play on the side. I got to about 11 or 12 and they were short one day, and they asked me to field. I just thought, ‘I really like this, I want to play,’ but there were no opportunities for girls. None. So my option was to go play with the boys.”
There were challenges that came with playing with the boys, including working out where she could get changed before and after a match. There were no women’s changing rooms so Rees took any private corner she could find, including getting changed in the scorebox. The boys would often exclude her and she spent her formative years in the sport feeling like an outsider. “I would go to cricket and no one would speak to me, none of the boys. I look back and I think ‘God, you’d have to be pretty in love with the game to carry on doing that every week.’
“The thing that motivates me all the time is I want to make it better than the experience I had,” she says. “I’m not saying my experience was bad, it probably shaped me into who the person I am, but I think to have the opportunity to play in a girls’ team is amazing.”
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When Rees turned 16, her parents began to take her from their home in Swansea to Bath to play for the West of England, the nearest women’s cricket team. “Every other weekend, it’d be London, Nottingham, us having to go places really far away,” she says. As lovely as it was to join a girls’ team, there was one major problem: it meant wearing a skirt. “I remember on my first day they handed me a skirt and I was like, ‘What is this? I’m not wearing that!’ I remember my mum looking at me and telling me I had to wear it if I wanted to play.”
Rees didn’t care that it was an England team because it was the only girls’ team she could play for. “There was no Welsh team at the time, I didn’t mind that it was England,” she says. “It was just the only option.” Rees played for an England Under-17 side but felt most proud in 2002 when she featured in Wales’s first ever women’s team. “I think that meant so much more [to me]. I was really lucky actually, because I played football for Wales when I was 14, so I knew what that meant, I already had a proper Welsh cap. So when I played cricket for Wales, I knew it was really special.” Wales beat Scotland in that first international match, and Rees went on to captain the side for many years before moving on to coaching.
“I played for a long time, and then coaching took over really. I almost fell out of love with playing the game in my early 30s,” Rees says. She pauses for a moment before continuing: “My dad passed away. And for me, it was like, I don’t want cricket anymore. But he was really good at coaching. And for me it was about helping people. I think that’s what made me fall in love with coaching.”
For over twenty years, Rees has run the women’s and girls’ cricket programme in Wales, and most of that time has been as a volunteer alongside a full-time job at the vehicle inspectorate. “All my time, or my annual leave, or my evenings or my weekends, I would spend either training or coaching,” she explains. “And I think my role just grew organically as the game started growing. There were more teams, there were more girls. And all of a sudden, I ended up in a position where I was spending so much time on cricket I almost had two full-time jobs. But I wasn’t being paid for two full-time jobs.”
Two years ago, the opportunity arrived for Rees to take on women’s cricket in a full-time capacity. She is employed by Glamorgan County Cricket Club, who run the Wales teams, but also runs the regional programme in Wales looking after all female players in the country. “It was a massive pay cut, but it doesn’t matter. I get to wake up every day now and know I am making women’s cricket better in Wales. And that’s all that matters.”
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The new job was meant to help Rees get some much-needed free time, but she soon filled her weekends and evenings with more cricket work. On top of her full-time job, Rees is the assistant coach at Welsh Fire in the Hundred, and also coaches the Western Storm academy. She works as an England scout for the ECB, and is head coach of Wales Under-18s and Wales Women. This week she could be flying to Mumbai to help introduce cricket to underprivileged girls there.
“One of the benefits of this job was that I should get some time now to have a life,” she says with a laugh. There is no spare time, but I’m not convinced she would have it any other way.
Aimee Rees has been shortlisted for the Grassroots award at the 2023 Sunday Times Sportswomen of the Year awards, in association with Citi. The winners will be announced on November 2. To vote, and enter a prize draw to win a cruise, visit sportswomenoftheyear.co.uk/vote-for-your-chance-to-win/
