Hazell winning on Mother’s Day

As a player and a coach, Dani Hazell has experienced plenty of success on the cricket field. However, there are few things that give the former England bowler greater joy than returning home to her two-year-old son Max at the end of each day. 

The 34-year-old is one of a small number of PCA members who are mums, with the players’ association looking to work closely with the ECB on establishing maternity protections for the women’s game in the near future to support those players wishing to start a family.

On Mother’s Day, the head coach of the Northern Diamonds and Northern Superchargers shares with the PCA what it’s like to be a mum in professional cricket and how it’s changed how she sees the sport.

Being a parent certainly gives you more perspective in life. Coming home to somebody who just wants your attention makes you realise all the little things that can bug you don’t matter.

It takes the strain off work for me. When I go home, I play with tractors and I play with trains and I play with whatever else has been thrown around the house. If I’ve had a bad day and I walk in through the door and he’s the first person I see and smiles at me, it makes me appreciate that yes, those things are disappointing, but there’s a lot more to life than cricket.

When I played it was all about ‘how do I win?’ Naturally, that side of the game is important to you. But now I think back to times when I was in a bit of a mood because I didn’t get many runs or wickets and actually, in the grand scheme of life, it wasn’t the end of the world. 

I love my job but sometimes your family has to come first. The last few years have given me the ability to understand that when something comes up that I need to deal with at home, that’s my priority.  

Juggling my roles as head coach and parent has been a learning curve for everybody. Early on, I went through battles of what I should be prioritising and whether that had an effect on my job or my team. And equally for those around me, there was a process of them understanding that I’m a first-time mum and this is completely new to me as well.   

The current situation of having first-time professionals, first-time coaches and first-time mums marries up quite nicely. There will be things that we get wrong but the more honest conversations we have, the better understanding of each person’s situation we will get. That mutual understanding between the players and myself is something I already try to enact as a coach.  

The next step we need to work on is clarifying what support is needed to help new mums return to cricket, whether that be as player or coaches. Some will want to step straight back in, so we need to understand if there are areas of the game they can be involved in without returning to the physical side too soon. It’s about having the options in place for people to come back to the sport as and when they’re ready.  

My experience shows that it is possible to be involved with professional cricket and be a mum. When you’re a player you think ‘I haven’t got time to do this, I haven’t got time to do that’. But there’s always time in your day for what you want to do and you can have both of those lives.   

For me, it’s imperative to make sure that I’m doing what I need to do for Max, giving him the opportunity to be the best he can be. If he goes on to be a cricketer, brilliant. If he doesn’t, it doesn’t matter.   

I just want to be able to give him the opportunities that I had and, equally, a lot of opportunities I didn’t have. I want him to be whatever he wants to be and enjoy what he does with a smile on his face. That’s all that really matters.