Student-led cricket matches as a product of coaching/mentoring: an autoethnographic account

Using a historical, autoethnographic approach, we discuss six student-led cricket matches which we organized in Perth, Australia over the 1979-81 period. From a Foucauldian perspective, we present these games as a student-led resistance against the normalizing and disciplinary processes of official school and youth cricket. The original scoresheets and match summaries exist both then and now only as subjugated knowledges. As these matches’ two captains, we attribute the positive atmosphere, which encouraged such creative initiatives, as being partly due to our class teacher Mr. Morrison’s vision and ethos, which contrasted with the toxic hyper-masculinity of the other men teachers. Through a look at our student-led cricket matches of 1979-81, we recall memories of whiteness within a socially conservative and overall pro-British cultural context.