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SHAUN MARTYN
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SHAUN MARTYN is the co-founder and CEO of the Women’s Int’l Cricket League. Martyn, along with his business partner, former Australian cricketer
LISA STHALEKAR, was inspired to create an elite women’s league after noticing the lack of opportunity and financial reward for women on the int’l cricket stage. The proposed two-week long Twenty20 championship is partnering with Edinburgh Business School, Hindustan University and the University of Western Australia to create scholarship opportunities for top players and Martyn is currently seeking investment in a documentary series around the WICL’s global search for talent. Martyn spoke with SBD Global about the WICL’s goals, creating opportunity and the viability of women’s cricket.
On the WICL’s goals …
Shaun Martyn: What we’re about is creating opportunity, education and performance for women. We’ve used cricket as a catalyst because it’s the sport that we as a group understand the best. And also because of my business partner, Lisa Sthalekar, who is arguably the best female cricket player of all time. She was an Indian orphan by birth who went on to captain Australia. This whole beat that we’ve created, the WICL, is about just that -- creating greater opportunity for women in professional sport and opportunity in general. This for us now has become a much bigger issue than just a cricket issue. It’s now become an issue around those things for women.
On women’s cricket opportunities …
Martyn: If you think of men’s cricket, they have multiple opportunities around the world to ply their trade and play. Women don’t. We’re trying to create that opportunity for them so that they can gain greater financial independence but also to set an example around what can be done in women’s sport and to also prove the point that there is a large audience there that’s very interested in women’s sport. A lot of the things that you’ll see me write and tweet about is that sport tends to be seen and driven by the media as stronger and faster as opposed to being about the contest. We’ve seem to have lost that notion in the sport -- that sport’s about the contest, not everything being bigger, stronger or faster. If you think about what’s happened with tennis over the years and golf, we’re looking to do the same thing with women’s cricket -- make it a proper product. We’ve got fashion designers working on what the women will play in and we’ve got some new technology that we’ll introduce into the game that the men’s game doesn’t have. We’ll create a proper product which is what we believe it should be. And then of course, running off the back of all of this, is the fact that we’re creating opportunity for women.
On partnering with Sthalekar …
Martyn: About 10 years ago, I was looking for a female guest speaker for a function and I got introduced by my great friend [former Australian cricketer] GEOFF LAWSON to Lisa Sthalekar. She spoke and I got more interested in what she was doing and who she was. I became the first manager of a female cricketer, which was Lisa. But, it wasn’t a financial decision because she was hardly getting paid. So you can’t take a fee as a manager from someone who is virtually not getting paid. It just got more interesting in terms of finding out more and more about cricket. … The interesting thing then was to see how much she was expected to train and perform like a professional athlete but was not remunerated anything like the men were. It was just ridiculous, in terms of the difference in financial reward and opportunity in comparison to the men. That sort of progressed and progressed. Then I wrote her book with her in 2012. I helped her write her biography. Then she retired from international cricket after the Women’s World Cup in 2013. While this was all going on, we were looking at the quality of women’s play and how much it had improved, and also what we saw was the size of the audience around the world that was interested in watching women’s cricket. That’s how we decided that we would create the WICL with a view to creating those three things, opportunity, education and performance for women. It wasn’t just about creating a tournament, it was about the bigger picture of how to make it sustainable over a long period of time.
On finding a place for the WICL …
Martyn: We’ve been working very hard to work with the boards of all the countries around the world and the ICCs so that we’re working with them, not trying to do something in opposition to them. It’s not about that. It’s about finding the appropriate window in the calendar that allows something like this to go ahead where we can support the work of the boards and the ICC. That’s been our intention from day one. It’s never been to set up something in opposition to someone. It’s about, “How can we help develop women’s cricket globally?”
On the viability of women’s cricket …
Martyn: We’ve built a really strong business case around the viability of what we’re doing. There’s always doubt about whether women’s sport is monetary so to speak from a business perspective. And it is. It absolutely is. But you have to create a real product around it. The product has to be one that encompasses a lot of different dimensions, not just bigger, stronger, faster. I think that’s a very outdated notion in sport. I also think that women and men view sport differently. Lots of women see sport as participation where men, obviously, a lot of the time see it purely as competition. And I think that’s a significant difference.
Hangin' With runs each Friday in SBD Global.
