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Meet Western Storm's New Head Coach: Part Two

14 March 2017

It was announced recently that Trevor Griffin has been appointed as the new Head Coach of the Western Storm.

Trevor, who was the Storm's Performance Analyst and Assistant Coach last year, will be looking to build on the success of last year when the team finished as runners up in the Kia Super League.

We caught up with him and discussed, amongst other things, what he got up to over the winter. "It was a bit of a strange few months to be honest," he said. "Ten days after being appointed as the new Head Coach of Western Storm, I flew out to New Zealand to work with Canterbury Cricket. So a lot of my work around schedules and things had to be drawn up whilst I was away. I got back on Christmas Eve, had a bit of a rest over the festive period and since then it's been really full-on in terms of various meetings to make sure that we've got our planning and strategies in place so that we can hopefully start working with our players in the next few weeks."

In 2016 the Storm squad featured England Captain Heather Knight, England Vice Captain Anya Shrubsole and West Indian superstar Stafanie Taylor but as Trevor explained when we caught up with him recently, reaching last season's final was a genuine team effort. "We had a great team last year," he said. "I think any team with those three players in it would be a strong one. It was a bit of a coup to have those three but I think it says a lot about women's cricket within the region that the rest of the players in the squad were of a very high standard as well. For a number of the players it was the first time that they would have played in front of such big crowds and that brings with it added pressure. It meant that we asked a lot of our younger players and they all performed extremely well."

Trevor is excited about the young players who could be coming through the ranks in the near future. "The England pathway has changed slightly," he said. "There used to just be an England age group at under 15, under 19 and academy level but now each of the six Kia Super League hosts have development centres. These will now deal with players from the ages of 14 to 17 which gives us a much larger pool of players to work with and for England to pick from. This can only be good news for the the national side and obviously for us when it comes to future players for the Storm."

When can we expect to find out who will be representing Western Storm in 2017? "Hopefully we should be in a position to make an official announcement next month," Trevor said. "Player allocation is extremely important and it is vital for the integrity of the tournament that we make sure that it is a case of the best versus the best and that there is an even spread of talent across the participating teams."

Finally we asked Trevor how Western Storm can go one better this year and take the title. "It's going to be a case of more of the same," he said. "We can all be really proud of what we achieved last season and I genuinely believe that we can go one step further this time around. If the players believe in themselves and execute their skills, we will certainly be up there again this year."

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