When Bangladesh earned the precise to host the Ladies’s T20 World Cup in 2024, the ecosystem rose to the problem. It was a possibility to present the vertical the fillip it wanted, economically and culturally.
A authorities overthrow and the following social unrest pressured a relocation of the occasion to the UAE, with participant security assuming high precedence. It undid months of build-up, promotional occasions, and advocacy from gamers inside and outdoors the nation.
For Arifa Jahan Bithi, who runs the primary and solely academy within the nation for girls, the Ladies’s Dreamer Cricket Academy in her hometown of Rangpur, a possibility to show attitudes in the direction of ladies pursuing cricket in Bangladesh was misplaced.
“There’s a buzz, however nobody takes a lot curiosity in girls’s cricket,” she advised Sportstar concerning the temper within the nation across the ongoing Ladies’s ODI World Cup marketing campaign in India and Sri Lanka.
“The fact is that lots of people within the nation nonetheless don’t know girls play cricket.”
Arifa coaches over 350 ladies without cost in her academy. “One of many native division secretaries dealing with cricket in my space permitted me to make use of the bottom there for my academy. It’s not land I personal. Every thing else for the academy and gamers has come from my financial savings,” she explains. Her wards play throughout the primary division, the second division, the Dhaka Premier League, the U-16, and U-19 ranges. Two of her college students are within the nationwide camp as properly.
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“Our tradition continues to be pretty conservative. There isn’t a push for girls in cricket, so the help to arrange one thing like this was not there.”
Arifa famously posted visuals of Bangladesh tempo sensation Marufa Akter ploughing her father’s paddy discipline through the peak of the pandemic, which drew consideration and consequently help for the younger pacer, then an adolescent.
The bowler’s evolution mirrors how programs in Bangladesh have needed to develop alongside her. There was lots of stigma related to girls in sports activities, rubbing shoulders with boys, and even dressing like them to play. When that’s the discourse, as a coach, placing conversations about power coaching, constructing muscle, and energy on the grassroots stage has been something however simple.
“There isn’t any facility in Bangladesh but the place energy hitting is being targeted on at a baseline stage. Earlier, grassroots didn’t have gymnasium periods or swimming routines or something. We simply bowled, batted, labored on method, and we have been executed,” Arifa defined, stating how these very components have helped Marufa evolve as a pacer, each in energy and endurance.
Arifa coaches over 350 ladies without cost in her academy on land permitted to be used by the division’s sports activities secretary.
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Arifa coaches over 350 ladies without cost in her academy on land permitted to be used by the division’s sports activities secretary.
| Picture Credit score:
SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
Whereas she has remained one among her greatest supporters, she by no means formally skilled the 20-year-old.
She has drawn classes from the experiences of Marufa and lots of others like her coming by the system.
“Cricket wants to achieve the college and district stage. Our cricket in Bangladesh is primarily nonetheless rising from the school division stage,” she famous.
“If it drips right down to the college stage, the pool of gamers coming by will improve. The services our boys get and the tiers of cricket they’ve don’t exist within the girls’s sport. Most faculties don’t have cricket for ladies. That should change.”
“There’s cash now in cricket. Folks could make a profession on this sport. That information ought to attain folks. That’s why our cricket lags behind a good bit.”
Bangladesh registered simply its second win in its second ODI World Cup look, beating Pakistan by seven wickets. Arifa is aware of the powerful mandate Bangladesh has readily available, however hopes her nation will come away with extra positives to hold into the longer term, on and off the sector.
“By means of the work I’m doing, by skills like Marufa and the whole lot the ladies do within the nationwide crew, I need my nation to see that ladies are at least anybody. That they will turn out to be skilled cricketers and problem the very best on this planet,” she signed off.
Printed on Oct 07, 2025