Jonathan Batty's transition into coaching and geology acts as reminder of post-playing possibilities

NICK FRIEND: Since ending his playing career in 2013, Batty has faced the same challenging transition experienced by many. As well as enjoying a growing profile in the women's game, he is head of cricket - and a geography teacher - at Caterham School

The Cricketer's Schools Guide 2021

There are some useful lessons to learn from Jonathan Batty’s career as a former professional cricketer, not least that his post-retirement journey has taken him to a new passion in the classroom.

Contracted to Surrey and Gloucestershire across three decades, he was a stalwart of the county circuit, who racked up 9,685 runs in the first-class game and played a part in almost 1,000 dismissals as a wicketkeeper.

Seven years on from his final game - a one-off appearance for Northamptonshire - he finds himself fully invested in school life, as an initially reluctant geography teacher and head of cricket at Caterham School.

He is tasked with both sides of the coach's coin: developing the next generation of promising youngsters while providing cricket to those with little interest in the game. It is an intriguing test of his own capacity to adapt, especially for a man who had initially been determined to “stay in the professional game” once he had finished playing.

“The world that I knew and was comfortable in was working in professional cricket as a professional cricketer with other professional cricketers – not with 12-year-olds who don’t really know what cricket is and aren’t sure whether they like it or not,” he says.

“If you’re going to make it as a sportsman, you have to be self-motivated and you have to absolutely adore the sport. Those players almost look after themselves in terms of that side of things. Where the challenge comes is in trying to find ways of getting through to pupils who either don’t have either any experience of it or any love for it.

“We’ve had a couple of lads join Harlequins and Wasps on rugby programmes in the last couple of years, and we’ve had a couple of boys in each year group who are in Surrey age-groups. We want to support those boys as best we can, but also for the majority of our pupils, we want them to enjoy sport, get the benefits from it and carry it on for the rest of their lives.”

He namechecks 17-year-old seamer Nathan Barnwell as one to keep an eye on: “I think he’s got the gift to potentially go all the way”. The Caterham pupil is on Surrey’s academy programme and has already made his second-team debut.

^{Jonathan Batty is head of cricket and a geography teacher at Caterham School}

The vast majority, though, won’t become professional athletes. “Some of them will have no interest in sport and we try to work on ways of getting them to engage with it and find some enjoyment there.

“If we can endear them with a love of sport – whether that be cricket, rugby or hockey for the boys and lacrosse or netball for the girls – and then they leave school and join sports clubs at university, that’s a real marker of success for us.

“We all know the benefits of playing sport in physical and mental wellbeing, but also just for general friendship groups. If you move anywhere in the world and join a sports club, you’ve got a ready-made friendship group on your doorstep.”

For Batty, this was far from the original plan. By the time he retired, he had already tried his hand at media work with Setanta TV and TriNorth Communications, preparing himself for the inevitable shock of life after cricket. “You know it’s coming because the body isn’t doing quite what you want it to,” he laughs. “Even at 35, I was desperate to grab an England call-up, so I was still pushing myself at that point.

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“But then, you’re 36 or 37 and the kids are coming up from the academy and you’re trying to keep up with the fitness testing in pre-season. You score 50 on days where in the past you’d have scored 150. It creeps up on you.

“But at the end, I thought: ‘Actually, what am I going to do?’ I was probably a bit naïve in thinking I’d get a job in the pro game coaching, which didn’t materialise.”

It was a route he was keen to take, and one of his first steps after hanging up his gloves was to secure his Level Four coaching badge. Yet, as interviews for head coach and director of cricket jobs came and went, each one met with similar messages of rejection, he took a job at Eltham College. “I’d had a couple of months off but then went: ‘Oh hang on a minute; where’s my next paycheque coming from here?’” That very real question is the quandary that so many ex-pros find thrust upon them.

On the side, he continued to dabble in elite circles: he worked with England’s batsmen at under-17 level and coached Gloucestershire’s wicketkeepers. Since then, he has spent time with England Women’s wicketkeeper group, featuring Sarah Taylor, Amy Jones and Lauren Winfield-Hill.

^{Batty's professional career was spread across three different decades}

Gradually, that portfolio has led him to this point. He balances his schoolwork with a role as Surrey Women head coach, while he also led South East Stars in the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy during the summer of 2020 and previously worked alongside Richard Bedbrook on the Surrey Stars coaching team during the Kia Super League days.

At Caterham, he played a fundamental role in setting up the girls’ programme; they were due to play their first games last summer, only for circumstances to put paid to those plans. Beforehand, Kent batsman Kirsty Dymond played for the school’s boys’ first team.

Batty’s tale of the women’s game’s rise in popularity among his students is telling. “For a couple of years, I’d sent questionnaires out, asking the girls if they wanted to start playing cricket. It was a resounding no,” he explains.

He has learned since that any reticence was merely the result of a lack of exposure and a subsequent suspicious hesitance. Traditionally, the girls’ summer sports were rounders and tennis. So Batty took cricket taster sessions into PE classes, aiming to break down any barriers. “All of a sudden, we got some huge interest from the girls,” he adds. “The delay was purely because they’d never played before.

“Without wanting to try to force them into it, we just gave them a taster of it, and it’s been really successful. We’re hoping that’s going to keep on growing and growing.”

Geography – geology, specifically – is the other aspect of his second career. He is making the most of a degree in natural sciences from Durham and a post-grad from Oxford.

“Volcanoes and earthquakes are my thing,” he laughs. “The kids love a bit of destruction and a bit of carnage!”

He only stumbled into it amid pressure from a former headmaster, who pushed him to utilise his interest after the previous head of department left.

^{Batty coached South East Stars during the summer}

“I said: ‘No, I’ve got no interest in teaching – I want to be a professional cricket coach,’” he recalls. “Eventually, he wore me down and I said I’d give it a go. The first lesson I ever taught was an upper-sixth class and I absolutely loved it.

“I remember to this day: I had 12 pupils in front of me. I played in T20 finals in front of 20,000 people and was far more nervous with 12 kids looking at me and expecting me to get them through their A Levels.

“At the end of that first year of teaching, I remember the day when the A Level results came out. I was at home and was sat with my wife. I logged onto the system to check the results. She turned to look at me and said: ‘Are you crying?’ And I was. I was so proud of how those pupils had done in their A Levels.

“She just said to me: ‘You’ve made the right decision’ – in terms of going into teaching. I love it. I find it hard work. I find it a massive challenge. I’ve been in the classroom for six years now, but I still feel like I’m relatively new to it.

“My most comfortable place is out on the cricket field still, because I did that from the age of nine to when I was 38.”

But as talk continues around the difficult transition that follows life as an elite athlete, Batty’s story is at least a reminder that there is more beyond the game to learn to love.

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