Brad Zeller, Australian Women's Coach

Indoor Cricket World's exclusive interview with Brad Zeller, the Australian Women's Indoor Cricket Team's coach, continues.

PART 4.

Indoor Cricket World: Other than your duties as Australian Coach and the coming World Cup, is there anything else in the world of indoor cricket that really excites you?

Brad Zeller: As we've discussed before, I'm still very enthusiastic about the promotion of women in the sport, especially the youngsters.

Indoor Cricket World: And you are actively involved in this?

Brad Zeller: Definitely. We have numerous schools that use our facility and what I do is identify players that I believe show promise, but more to the point, the ones that are the keenest. It is not hard to identify them. I then invite them to practise on a Friday afternoon ( every 3rd week) for free with me. At the moment there are 7 girls that take advantage of this.

This all started when a couple of the Mums brought their daughters in to play and they found they loved it and stayed, so I started coaching them. From there I try to introduce the new girls into our mixed or ladies competitions.

Another idea I am trialling is to set up a competition on a Sunday afternoon for school teams. At the moment the girls play in a structured school competition every Wednesday afternoon. I see it as an extension from there. The way I go about this is to write to the schools, inform them as to what I am trying to achieve, and go from there. I explain the process from playing in-house, playing for your club, zone etc. There are also development squads for young women in Queensland, set up by our development officer Tahnee Norris.

ICW: We're interested in getting regular reports on your progress on all that, so we can keep our readers informed.

BZ: Not a problem.

ICW: Okay Brad, now we're going to put you on the spot. Give us your thoughts on the coming World Cup.

BZ: The "World Cup", well what do i think?

Firstly, I think the AICF has shown great initiative in holding a workshop recently for coaches, managers sport trainers and officials. Some great ideas come out of that not only for the World Cup but for the next couple of years. I would like to elaborate but some finer details are still being worked through and some of it is designed to be announced on the night of the Open Nationals presentation dinner. Suffice to say that if the players are accepting of their responsibilities and the honour of playing for their country then Australia will benefit.

So far as Australia's chances go, well I am quietly confident that the Women will be hard to beat. Mind you I am nowhere near over-confident because I could see bigger things for the Kiwi's last year, but beating Australia was not in the equation.
The Aussie team last year was a fantastic group of women that got on famously, were competitive against each other, trained hard and played harder. I learnt from that trip as well and have come up with a few different ideas for this year.

New Zealand will be a great place to have the World Cup and I have enjoyed each trip there. The venue is fantastic and the way Mark Cini has described his plans for the cup it sounds like it will be another great trip.

All eyes will be focused on the men I suppose, especially after their trip last year where they dropped a couple of warm-up games in New Zealand and a Test in Sri Lanka. As with the women, the make-up of the team will be important and we will not know that until the week of the Nationals. The men realise that they need to work even harder to keep the "wolves at bay" so to speak, and I am sure they will be up to the task. I know their coach (Ross Gregory) and I'm pretty sure that discipline will not be a problem. Ross is more than aware of the pressure on Australia and I am positive he will not leave any stone unturned in his quest for his team's glory.

ICW: Indoor Cricket World may also be at and reporting directly from the World Cup in New Zealand, if sponsorship is found to allay the costs.... more on that at a later date. In the meantime, we'd like to sincerely thank Brad Zeller for his participation in this series of interviews. And we'd also like to promise readers that this is not the last you have seen from Brad on these pages . . . again, more on that at a later date too.

Brad Zeller Interview Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

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