From tragedy to triumph: Alyssa Healy’s story

“Cricket has given me an escape from the grief and sadness of losing someone in your family.”

When a 12-year-old Alyssa Healy was watching television at her home after school, her mother, hit by a premonition, told her she was going to see her sister Kareen play footy. Usually, Kareen who was four years older than her, would be dropped home by a friend’s mom or the mother would go fetch her late so that young Alyssa wasn’t alone. That day, though, she told Alyssa. “I just feel like I need to go watch Kareen play.”

Sometime later, a friend of her mom came home, told Alyssa to spend the night at their house as the mother would be late. “I remember having the best night of my life.” Lessee did she know that life at the Healy household would never be the same again. Next morning, her mom told her, “Kareen collapsed at touch footy and she is in hospital on life support. And it’s not looking good”.

She had suffered an anaphylactic reaction, gone into cardiac arrest, and slipped into a coma.

Couple of days later, Alyssa walked out of a cricket ground after hitting a hundred to see her father waiting. “They’d just switched off the life-support and if you want to go and say your last goodbyes, you could go and do that”. Recalling that moment, Alyssa said  “it was a surreal day of a nice memory turned into a horrible one and interestingly enough, it’s always sort of on that day we play a game of cricket and funnily enough I seem to make a hundred every year, which is, um, kind of bizarre. It’s a bizarre feeling but a nice one as well.”

One of her big games earlier in life had come tagged with a terrible smear. At her high school at Bakers College when she was 17, she was picked for the first eleven and was the only girl to be picked to play with the boys in an upcoming tournament.

Next morning at 6 am, a reporter from Channel Nine news landed up at her home. Her parents were away, and she was living with her grandmother when the reporter gave her a newspaper and asked if she had seen the news?

Alyssa stared at a headline about Osama Bin Laden with a photo of her in her school jersey holding a bat. It turned out that one of the Old Boys, alumni of her school, had sent a letter in disgust at the inclusion of a girl in the boys’ team, of how it was a disgrace and such. The media had got hold of it and ran with it. She didn’t take the train that day to school, and had someone drop her at school, where the media were crowding around the gate. She slid through a side entrance and for the rest of the day watched her principal handle the media at the gates.

From the death of her sister to misogyny, cricket has been Alyssa’s healer. It would also offer love.