Mega gallery: Howzat! Junior cricket returns with clean cover drives and cracking catches

This weekend Canberra pitches were once again flooded with youngsters aiming to become the next Pat Cummins or Ellyse Perry, marking the start of another junior cricket season.

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And among those teams in action, the small but mighty Yerrabi District Cricket Club has used its rapidly growing junior membership base to rescue another more established club from permanently losing its women's pathway.

The Canberra Times went out on Saturday and captured the best photos of junior boys and girls bowling, batting and fielding from Wests, Tuggeranong Valley, Yerrabi, North Canberra-Gungahlin, and Ginninderra cricket clubs.

The kits might have been baggy but the cover drives were clean as kids enjoyed a beautiful morning of cricket in the Canberra sunshine.

• Check out the 124 junior cricket photos in the gallery below!

Wests Lions Strikers, Tuggeranong Vikings, Wests Warriors, Yerrabi, North Canberra and Gungahlin, and Ginninderra cricket club juniors hit the pitch this weekend across the capital. Pictures by Keegan Carroll

Yerrabi has had a huge participation boom in the Gungahlin region in recent years, and used that to become a success story for cricket in the ACT.

Yerrabi's clever partnership with North Canberra-Gungahlin Cricket Club brought back the latter's women's team from extinction this year, by funnelling several of its most promising junior girls to the senior level.

Now for the first time since the 2021-22 season, North Canberra-Gungahlin have returned to women's grade cricket.

"Norths struggled over the past few years to keep a women's team going, so we joined forces and thankfully we found there was a fair bit of interest. We've been able to establish a new combined women's premier grade team for this season, which is just awesome," Yerrabi president Brooke Bligh said.

"Some of our stage three girls are moving up to the new women's team, and our hope is to maintain that in this region so girls have a pathway to play senior cricket.

"In cricket you quite often lose girls when they get into those later teenage years, because there's just not a lot out there for them.

"There's lots for boys, because they go straight through to colts level, which takes them up to 18 years old, and then the men's competition is a lot bigger and more established with many different grades they can move into.

"So it's a slightly smoother transition from junior to senior for the boys, but for girls, there's only one competition at the moment.

"We worked with Cricket ACT to come up with ways to keep girls engaged and give them options as they get older, so this partnership with Norths has been really valuable."

Yerrabi District Cricket Club girls in action. Pictures Supplied

Yerrabi was established only in 2021 but its growth in that time has led to 15 junior teams playing cricket each weekend, and there are goals for the club to have its own men's and women's premier teams one day too.

"We're definitely maintaining our growth too, as the kids get older and move out, we're still bringing in new kids, which is great," Bligh said.

"We'd like to see Yerrabi sit alongside North Canberra-Gungahlin. There's definitely the interest in Gungahlin obviously with a very large Indian community, and the passion for cricket is real.

"I think there's definitely the population to sustain two senior clubs eventually, but it takes time."

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