Kim Garth, Grace Harris join list as Cricket Australia announces contracted women’s cricketers for 2023-24 season

Ahead of the new season, Cricket Australia (CA) has announced its list of contracted players for the 2023-24 year. Four new cricketers have been added to the 17-member list as players like Kim Garth, Heather Graham and Phoebe Litchfield have all been offered their first contracts while Grace Harris, who recently wreaked havoc in WPL 2023, joins the list after upgrading her contract from last season.

On the other hand, recently retired cricketer Rachael Haynes drops out while interestingly, Tasmanian all-rounder Nicola Carey has declined the offer presented to her.

"We’ve had a core group of players performing well over the last 12 months which means some talented players have missed out, it’s certainly made selection tough but we’re in a fortunate position to have such depth across Australian Cricket.

“Importantly, there is still the opportunity for players not offered contracts to earn upgrades through consistent performances, as we saw with Grace last year,” national selector Shawn Flegler said in a statement.

Flegler explained why Carey denied a new contract

As per Flegler, Nicola Carey expressed her desire to spend the winter in Tasmania and utilize full pre-season to develop her game. As per him, she wanted to push for the national team selection later in her career but ahead of that, she wanted to groom herself for international cricket.

“Carey expressed a desire to spend the winter in Tasmania to allow her to utilise a full pre-season at home, focusing on using that time to develop skills in her game to push for international selection in the future. We offered Nic a contract because we believe she is a player of international quality, but we respect her decision to focus on a pre-season program with Tasmania and will continue to support her moving forward.

She’s been around the squad for a while, but hasn’t played lots of games, and so she was just wanting to focus on having a really good pre-season with Tasmania. She felt like that would be the best avenue for her. She certainly hasn’t ruled out playing for Australia again, she made that very clear,” Flegler stated.

Cricket Australia 2023/24 contracted women’s players - Darcie Brown, Ashleigh Gardner, Kim Garth, Heather Graham, Grace Harris, Alyssa Healy, Jess Jonassen, Alana King, Meg Lanning, Phoebe Litchfield, Tahlia McGrath, Beth Mooney, Ellyse Perry, Megan Schutt, Annabel Sutherland, Tayla Vlaeminck, Georgia Wareham