Great outdoors: Living legend continues eye-catching switch

For a first-time international coach, being called upon to oversee preparation of Australia's all-conquering women's team might seem as daunting as being asked to string Rafael Nadal's racquets at Roland Garros.

But Jude Coleman – a living legend of indoor cricket who has been appointed assistant coach for the upcoming tours to Ireland and the UK (for the Birmingham Commonwealth Games) – knows better than most the pressure of expectation that accompanies habitually successful outfits.

She has captained her country to five Indoor World Cup titles – and been a member of the victorious team at two others – in a tournament where Australia's women have triumphed every time since it was first staged in 1998.

And from the 18 national indoor championships where she represented her native Queensland, Coleman celebrated 13 titles up until the most recent event held in pre-COVID times in 2019.

So while helping to plot the reigning women's ODI and T20 World Cup holders' historic tilt at a first Commonwealth Games gold medal might intimidate someone not-so-used to carrying the burden of favouritism, Coleman not only knows that terrain but how best to navigate it.

"There's no doubt the current Australia women's team carries an aura of success, and there's a real expectation that surrounds them every time they play," Coleman tells cricket.com.au.

"But I'm really excited to become part of that because it's probably not too different to the situation we faced so many times at Indoor World Cups.

"I can clearly remember a moment in the 2009 final (against South Africa) when things were getting a bit tight, and I thought to myself 'I could be the first person to captain a losing Australian team in a World Cup'.

"And they're not the sort of thoughts you want to be having during an important game."

Not only were South Africa more than halfway to their victory target of 121 having surrendered a solitary scalp that day, the crowd at Brisbane West's Indoor Sports Centre was starting to wonder if their hometown hero might be leading her team to an historic defeat.

But with the game in the balance, Coleman took the ball for her second (and final) over that yielded two crucial wickets in the space of three deliveries plus brought a run out, which quickly put Australia back on course for a sixth consecutive World Cup crown.

The 41-year-old will be absent from the the Indoor Cricket National Championships starting in Melbourne this weekend – only the second national titles she's missed in two decades – due to her new role as assistant to interim women's head coach Shelley Nitschke for the upcoming UK campaign.

She might have considered attempting to add to her five Monika Brogan Medals (now awarded to player of the national championships) given she's still a regular in Adelaide's Friday night indoor competition, though she admits it takes her "two or three days to recover from matches these days".

However, coaching has become the focus for her relentless pursuit of self-improvement since the conclusion of her playing days.

Coleman subsequently took a leap into the unknown by foregoing the financial and professional security offered by her then-life as a secondary school physical education teacher, and instead chose the rarely travelled road from indoor cricket to the outdoor game's loftiest heights.

And she sometimes has to pinch herself when reflecting upon where that journey has thus far taken her.

The path winds back to Beaudesert, 70km south of Brisbane and the other side of Tamborine Mountain from the Gold Coast, where Coleman and her younger brother (Phil) shared a love for sport.

For reasons she's still unable to decipher, young Jude's abiding passion was cricket.

"I'm not really sure where that came from," she recalls.

"My dad followed it a bit – his uncle (Tom Thwaites) played one game for Queensland just before the Sheffield Shield was suspended for World War Two – and things like the Boxing Day Test would always be on TV when I was growing up, but my mum had no great interest in cricket.

"For whatever reason, I just loved the game."

That love saw her turn out with the under-age boys teams at Kerry Cricket Club but, upon reaching adolescence when it was deemed unacceptable to stage mixed-gender matches and unaware of any girls-only competitions in the region, Coleman stepped reluctantly away from the game.

Despite dabbling in softball and vigoro (a game that fused elements of cricket, tennis and baseball), it wasn't until age 16 when she was asked to fill in for a family friend's indoor cricket outfit that Coleman re-connected with her first sporting love.

She soon became a regular player and was making the 75km trip to Ipswich where she gained selection in her first representative team, and quickly developed a skillset and an appetite for the frenetic indoor game.

"There's a real intensity playing indoor, and it's not just because of the pace of the game being played in a confined space," she said.

"The feeling you get when the game's on the line in a big tournament, it just feels different to similar moments when you're playing outdoors.

"It really is an incredible atmosphere."

So successful had the bowling allrounder become in the indoor realm, she brought a burgeoning renown and an arsenal of deliveries upon her 'return' to outdoor cricket aged 23, when she formed a potent combination with fellow Queensland Fire right-arm seamer, Kirsten Pike.

Her 60 WNCL matches for the Fire across a decade brought 84 wickets, but it was her phenomenal record at indoor tournaments for Queensland and for Australia that gilded her reputation.

Coleman is not alone in combining the similar-but-subtly-different skills required to reach top levels in indoor and outdoor cricket.

Women's players who have appeared at national indoor titles as well as in the WBBL include Australia representatives Elyse Villani, Amanda-Jade Wellington and Hannah Darlington, while Sarah Coyte will be again part of NSW's squad at this year's championships.

Record-breaking former Australia captain Belinda Clark also excelled in indoor competition, as have Test-capped men's players Steve and Mark Waugh, Bruce Reid and Jhye Richardson with recent limited-overs representatives Andrew Tye and Josh Philippe also involved at national indoor titles.

However, none of those have emulated Coleman's feat in starting exclusively as an indoor cricketer before evolving her game to the longer pitch and hard ball, then moving into a national and (now) international coaching role.

Having completed her final WNCL season in 2012-13 as the competition's leading wicket-taker (18 at 11.94) ahead of Victoria's Molly Strano, she returned to her teaching career while continuing to gain her competitive cricket fix on the indoor court.

"I always just thought I'd teach until I reached retirement age," Coleman said.

"I used to help out with the under-18 and under-15 girls' squads at Queensland, but that was really just a bit of a hobby.

"I never, ever saw myself leaving teaching but I guess I just got a little stale and felt like I needed a break, and at the end of the 2016 school year a job came up at Queensland Cricket."

It was former Fire and Brisbane Heat coach Pete McGiffin who – as Queensland under-18s girls coach at the time - was instrumental in Coleman taking the leap, having himself renounced his teaching role to become a full-time cricket mentor.

"Pete had liked his change from teaching into coaching and encouraged me to do the same, but it was a pretty big jump because teaching is a fairly safe and secure profession and coaching is far from that," Coleman said.

"Plus it involved a massive pay cut, so it wasn't an easy decision but I definitely don't regret it because, while I don't get paid as well as I did teaching, I enjoy it a helluva lot more.

"For me, as a PE teacher, I'm doing very similar things but with a sport that I love.

"And there's no marking, there's no sitting at weekends writing reports, which was the side of teaching I didn't enjoy."

There are still coaching reports to be drafted, but there's also history to be written.

It was 2019, the same year former Australia fast bowler Ashley Noffke replaced McGiffin at the helm of then-WBBL champions Brisbane Heat, that Coleman became the first Indoor World Cup-winning skipper to be appointed to a coaching role with a state set-up.

Having worked with former South Australia men's (and Australia women's) coach Mark Sorrell in Brisbane, she forged a connection with the SA Cricket Association that resulted in an assistant coach's job with the SA Scorpions and Adelaide Strikers, and a move from her beloved Queensland.

In her first three seasons in Adelaide, the Strikers reached two WBBL finals with the Scorpions also making last summer's WNCL play-off and, while none of those appearances yielded a trophy, her coaching prowess was clearly noted by Cricket Australia.

Having served as an assistant coach with Australia's under-19 women's team while working in Queensland, Coleman last year took charge of the Australia A squad that went undefeated through three T20s and three ODIs against England A.

Although she had previously coached some SA and Queensland members of that Australia A squad and knew others (such as veteran Villani) from her playing days, Coleman admits there were some in the group she had not met until their first training session at Canberra last January.

It will be a similar scenario when she connects with Meg Lanning's squad in Brisbane next month prior to their departure for Ireland and then the Commonwealth Games, where cricket will be making its first appearance since the one-off men's competition at the Kuala Lumpur Games in 1998.

There is a measure of irony in that, for many years, it was thought the indoor version offered cricket's best hope of earning inclusion in a Commonwealth or Olympic Games program.

But in the same way the most compressed version of the game was once viewed as the optimum vehicle to foster truly global competition, Coleman is challenging other long-held beliefs that the skills required for indoor cricket do not translate to its more expansive outdoor cousin.

"There has been a school of thought that playing indoor cricket can have a negative impact on your game, but I've never really bought into that," she said.

"As a bowler indoors, you have to develop a range of different deliveries which is pretty similar to what T20 players now need to do, and because you're fielding so close to the batter it helps sharpen your reflexes and your ability to hit the stumps.

"I think if you've been coached well for batting outdoors, then you can adapt to the indoor game where the key is to play the ball much later, underneath your eyes.

"But it's probably true that if you've learned to bat in indoor cricket, it can be tough to take that into the outdoor game without a bit of additional work."

It is undoubtedly that breadth of experience coupled with a willingness to "do the additional work" and adapt her game to succeed both indoors and out that has held Coleman in such good stead as a coach at the highest level.

She has, after all, seen the women's game evolve from an era when a WNCL player of the match would be rewarded with just 10 per cent of the prizemoney provided to men in a corresponding competition, but with women also receiving a vacuum cleaner or similar for their efforts.

"I was never lucky enough to win one of the appliances, but I know a few of the girls did," she laughs.

Having defied her own professional ambitions to turn her back on teaching and take a punt on the precarious life as a professional sports coach, Coleman places no restrictions on where the next phase of her journey might take her.

She need only look at the growth of the women's game around the globe, and the recent departure of previous Australia coach Matthew Mott (to England) and his former assistant Ben Sawyer (to New Zealand) to know that – rather like making the transition from indoor to outdoor cricket – the playing field is wide open.

"Did I initially get into coaching thinking 'I want to coach Australia' – probably not," Coleman said before she escaped Adelaide's biting winter chill for a welcome stint of northern hemisphere summer.

"But no matter what I do, I want to keep getting better and progress so in a roundabout way I've probably held aspirations to be a head coach somewhere one day.

"My family in Queensland is what ties me to Australia at the moment – my older sister (Jayne) and my brother have kids who I'm pretty close to, and I'd like to see my nieces regularly as they grow up before I considered heading overseas.

"I'm certainly happy where I am now and the Ireland tour and Comm Games should be an unforgettable experience, and one that I'm so grateful for the opportunity to be involved with.

"But after that, who knows?

"I wouldn't say no to any opportunity to better myself, and if I've learned anything from my experiences so far it's to never say never."

Australia's Tour of the UK, 2022

Australia's squad: Meg Lanning (c), Rachael Haynes (vc), Darcie Brown, Nicola Carey, Ashleigh Gardner, Grace Harris, Alyssa Healy, Jess Jonassen, Alana King, Tahlia McGrath, Beth Mooney, Ellyse Perry, Megan Schutt, Annabel Sutherland, Amanda-Jade Wellington

T20 Tri-Series

July 16: Australia v Pakistan

July 17: Australia v Ireland

July 19: Ireland v Pakistan

July 21: Australia v Ireland

July 23: Australia v Pakistan

July 24: Ireland v Pakistan

All matches start 3pm local time (midnight AEST) and played at Bready Cricket Club, Derry, Northern Ireland

2022 Commonwealth Games

July 29 v India (11am local time, 8pm AEST)

July 31 v Barbados (6pm local, 3am Aug 1 AEST)

August 3 v Pakistan (11am local, 8pm AEST)

Group A: Australia, India, Pakistan, Barbados

Group B: England, New Zealand, South Africa, Sri Lanka

Semi-finals: August 6, 11am local (8pm AEST) and 6pm local (3am Aug 7 AEST)

Bronze medal match: August 7, 10am local (7pm AEST)

Gold medal match: August 7, 5pm local (2am Aug 8 AEST)

All matches played at Edgbaston Stadium