Photo Credit: Queensland Cricket
Australian Cricket has announced a new stand-alone national women’s T20 competition that will create an exciting build-up to the Weber WBBL season while increasing wages and playing opportunities for domestic players.
The new competition will feature teams representing the eight WBBL teams as well as a team representing the ACT.
The competition will precede the WBBL season with the teams playing four matches. The four top teams at the end of the regular season will play off in the semi-finals and final.
The new competition comes as the WBBL season is shortened to 40 games plus three finals to optimise scheduling and will create more high performance opportunities for our domestic players while significantly increasing payments.
The inception of the new competition means the average payment for state contracted players will rise to $163,000 making women’s cricket easily the best paid women’s domestic team sport in Australia.
This comes after significant increases in CA women’s contracts (increased by 25%) and the WBBL salary cap (doubled to more than $732,000 per-season) in the latest MOU.
The new competition will also create more exposure for women’s cricket and move domestic players closer to full-time athletes as Australian Cricket looks to grow women and girls’ participation and capitalise on commercial opportunities as part of its recently released Women and Girls Action Plan.
State contracting is now open.
Nick Hockley, CA Chief Executive said:
“We are pleased to announce a new domestic T20 competition that will create more opportunities for elite female domestic players, while also complementing the optimised Weber WBBL schedule.
“Importantly this competition will increase payments to many players and take women’s domestic cricket a step further toward full time professionalism.
“Elite domestic cricket is the backbone of Australian Cricket’s ongoing success, and this competition will allow more domestic players the opportunity to gain top level experience and showcase their talents.”
