Student-Led Cricket Matches as a Product of Coaching/Mentoring

Abstract

Using a historical, autoethnographic approach in this article, we discuss six student-led cricket matches that we organized in Perth, Australia, from 1979 to 1981. From a Foucauldian perspective, we present these games as a student-led resistance against the normalizing and disciplinary processes of official school and youth cricket. The original scoresheets and match summaries exist both then and now only as subjugated knowledges. As these matches’ two captains, we attribute the positive atmosphere, which encouraged such creative initiatives, as being partly due to one class teacher's vision and ethos, which contrasted with the toxic hypermasculinity of the other men teachers. Through a look at our student-led cricket matches of 1979–1981, we recall memories of whiteness within a socially conservative and overall pro-British cultural context.