Coach of the Year: Tom Randle

Tom Randle - Coach of the Year, Coventry Girls, Cricket Collective Awards 2026

Women and girls’ cricket is on the rise across the country - but doors must still be opened and platforms laid on for aspiring youngsters who wish to try their hand or build up their skills.

Following a summer in which the England Women’s team have both reached a World Cup final on home soil and played a Test match at Lord’s for the very first time, women’s cricket is as prominent as it has ever been - but still there is plenty of room to continue developing growth to ensure the next generation have sufficient opportunities and pathways into the sport.

Indeed in Coventry, there now exists a girls-only club so that all girls who are involved can directly benefit from the efforts and focus of the coaches who oversee sessions in the summer.

One such coach is Tom Randle, formerly a player who decided that more could be done for girls’ cricket - and he took it upon himself to oversee the birth of a new club.

For what Tom has done for Coventry Girls CC, established in 2024, he received fitting recognition for his efforts when he was recently crowned the Coach of the Year at the recent Cricket Collective Awards, which Warwickshire Cricket Foundation hosted at Edgbaston Stadium.

“I’ve been involved in cricket a long time, having played myself. I developed an interest in coaching,” Tom explained. “We started a girls’ team and found there was a real appetite for it.

“We found there are a lot of barriers in girls’ cricket. Our goal is to break those barriers - things like ground availability, training availability. We are still trying to fit a girls’ game into what has typically been a men’s sport.

“We decided we wanted to do things differently and remove those barriers where girls come first. This is a girls-only club. They get priority and we can really support them.

“We're trying to kind of allow girls of all different personalities and all different kinds of behaviours to thrive in the game.

“We want it to be accessible for everyone and hopefully those numbers grow. We have a variety of different personalities throughout the club, which is great, and for us it is about opening up as many doors as we can.”

The early sessions, shortly after the club was launched, would attract in the region of 15 girls. Now, a couple of years on, and Coventry Girls can sometimes welcome numbers up towards 70.

In fact the development of the club has been so strong that Tom, along with the other staff on board, are having to monitor numbers to ensure that they have the sufficient coaches and appropriate space for all girls to be able to attend, train and enjoy their cricket.

“The numbers have flown,” Tom smiled. “The growth has been so good. The biggest challenge now is how we can continue to provide the scale for that growth - things like kind of coaching numbers and space.”

More so than just as cricketers, Tom and Coventry Girls aim to develop their members as people, too, by entrusting the older girls with leadership responsibilities.

He explained: “We have seven or eight coaches now, but we’re getting to a stage now where the older girls are beginning to help the younger girls. The priority is for us to develop our own coaches.

“Coaches are like gold-dust and stumbling across coaches is difficult, so we are trying to create and nurture our own. They are developing people skills and a confidence to lead a group. We are supporting them through that.

“I think it will keep growing and growing, because we are offering something different and that is what we pride ourselves in.”

Tom has worked with Anthony Kilroy and Emily Townsend to help bring Coventry Girls to life; Emily, who oversees the admin side of things, is described as the ‘brains’ who fields interest from prospective new members.

The club, who are based at Bablake School playing fields in the summer and who have use of the indoor facility on site in the winter, have also worked with Warwickshire Cricket Foundation to help establish themselves.

They will maintain that relationship as they continue to grow.

“It’s a relationship which is really important for us, because we have huge aspirations as a club,” Tom said of WCF. “Our long-term vision is to have our own ground, and we are talking with the Foundation about that - they are giving us support and options, so it is a close relationship.”

As a part of the awards ceremony, Emily read out a number of positive adjectives submitted by members of the club to describe Tom, a sure sign that the coaching sessions being put on are having the desired effect.

“I've never been one that's very good at listening to praise about myself, but to hear that from the girls themselves, it's really nice,” Tom added. “This shows actually the work that we do and the reason that we do it is valued.

“ I think that's important because we can have our best ideas around what we think we're doing right, but we want to hear that from the players, they’re the girls that are turning up every week or two, three times a week.”