Parkes cricketer Maddy Spence has been selected to represent the Sydney Thunder at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander T20 Cup to celebrate NAIDOC week.
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The Thunder will take on rivals the Sydney Sixers, with games to be played at Raby Sports Complex in Sydney on Dharawal country this Thursday and Friday.
Both male and female teams will play three games across two days, in addition to a Welcome to Country, barefoot circle, performance and school engagement activities.
14-year-old Spence is really starting to come into her own as a cricketer, and is looking forward to putting her recent efforts at training into action on the field.
"The goal is to pick up my pace a little bit and focus on hitting a good line and length," says Spence.
"If I get to bat, I want to take a step up from where I've been performing recently and get some runs.
I've been working on my leg glance with Andrew Litchfield (father of Orange WBBL star Phoebe Litchfield) down at Western Zone training so I'm looking forward to testing that out," says Spence.
It's not all about cricket though, with the opportunity to connect with culture something that has become important to the Spence Family.
Maddy's mum Kerry Spence explains that some members of her family weren't interested in accepting that they had Indigenous heritage.
"Half of our family wanted to accept our Wiradjuri culture while the other half pretended it didn't exist," Kerry says.
Fortunately for Maddy, she has grown up in an environment where her culture is celebrated and she has opportunities like the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander T20 Cup available to her.
She was even lucky enough to say the Welcome to Country when WBBL and BBL stars came to Parkes a few years to launch the Woolworths Cricket Blast program.
"It will be a great opportunity for me learn about culture from some really respected people.
"Being picked also means all the hard work I've been doing has paid off and people have started to notice me," Spence says.
The games will see a mix of the youngest, like Maddy, play with some of the veterans of the Sydney grade cricket scene like Wiradjuri woman Julie Muir, who will captain the Thunder and Roxsanne Van-Veen, a Gundungurra woman who will lead the Sixers.
