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As a 19-year-old already playing for the senior Proteas’ women’s team, Tumi Sekhukhune should have no regrets regarding her career, but she does have one.
It is that her father, Powell Sithole, is no longer alive to see the overnight success she has made of her cricketing career.
When Sekhukhune was in Grade 11, Sithole inexplicably collapsed and, after being taken to hospital, was put on life support for three weeks before he died.
Three years later, Sekhukhune’s eyes still well up with tears at the memory.
“I used to do a lot of things with my dad, so it’s really affected me because I find myself thinking what it would be like if he was here to see what I’m doing,” she said.
And what she is doing is nothing short of astonishing, especially given that she grew up in Daveyton, a place known more for producing football players such as Jabu Pule, Junior Khanye and Pollen Ndlanya. Having joined the SA Cricket Academy last year, the fast medium-swing bowler had set herself the goal of thinking about making the senior women’s team only sometime next year.
But she cracked the nod for the Proteas’ one-day international (ODI) and T20 tour of the West Indies last month and did so well that she left with the team for the Women’s T20 World Cup in the Caribbean.
Sekhukhune, whose calling card is accurate in-duckers and the ability to move it away, announced herself by making West Indies’ captain Stafanie Taylor her first victim in international cricket.
“Before the game, I was all nerves and excitement, so most of it was nerve-racking because I didn’t want to mess it up,” she said this week.
“I just reflected on what I do best, what I know and, after that, I felt calm and thought that I could do it.
“What made the occasion even more exciting was that my first wicket was one of the biggest names in the West Indies team, Stafanie Taylor. It was exciting to know I could do something and contribute to the team, which made me proud of myself.”
Three ODIs and four T20s later, all against the West Indies, the youngster has done enough to earn a spot on the Proteas team’s tilt at the T20 World Cup – which begins on November 9 and finishes on November 24 – an event at which the South Africans went as far as the semifinals last time.
This is all a far cry from when she began playing cricket.
“I got exposed to cricket when I was seven; my cousins used to play cricket on the street or the tennis courts. I just fell in love with it. I stopped playing cricket when I was 10 and focused on other things because there was no women’s cricket at the time.”
The other things included acrobatics, tennis, handball, volleyball, netball, hockey and swimming – and may well have ultimately contributed to the rapid development that has made her ready to play for the national team as a teenager.
“I came back to cricket at the age of 15. The coach who discovered me, Gift Xaka, saw me playing cricket with the boys in Daveyton and asked if I could play for his team. I started playing provincial cricket for the Easterns’ Under-19 team when I was 15.”
Having “challenged” the boys with her bowling, as she puts it, a nine-fer she took against the Griquas Under-19 girls’ side in 2014 convinced her she wanted to be a professional cricketer.
That said, the daughter of a domestic worker mother, Refilwe, Sekhukhune was raised to place a premium on education and, as such, she has enrolled for a BCom business management course next year.
But before that, there’s the small matter of trying to win the T20 World Cup.
“From the two camps we’ve had, we worked hard on our batting. On the bowling side, we worked on consistency and understanding our field placings.”
She said the recent tour of the West Indies would give the team an advantage because “we know we can deal with those conditions”.
