Claire represented England in cricket over 150 times during a 13-year international career between 1998 and 2011, winning two World Cups and the Ashes in 2005 and 2008. She retired in 2011 having made a superlative and award-winning impact on her sport.
Claire played cricket from the age of 10, both while at school and as an undergraduate, progressing to county level and frequently being selected for a range of England age-group squads, including the Under 21 team which took her to South Africa. Her full international debut was in 1998 in a One Day International against Australia.
Her cricketing excellence has broken records and won her many accolades. She still holds the record from 2006 for the highest score of any cricketer in an ODI match at Lords – 156 not out – beating Viv Richards’ previously held record of 138 from 1979. In 2009, she was the first woman ever to be selected as one of Wisden’s Cricketers of the Year. She won the ICC Women’s Cricketer of the Year in 2009, and that same year was also named as ECB’s Women’s Player of the Year. She was awarded an MBE for her contribution to cricket in 2010.
Whilst playing and after retirement, Claire worked for SUMS Consulting, based at the University of Reading. She completed a part-time MA in Applied Management at Henley Business School in 2016. She has worked on projects with SportsPark on a number of occasions and was a visiting lecturer for the School of Systems Engineering, speaking to final year undergraduates about project management in the real world.
“The University of Reading gave me a wonderful opportunity, after my sporting career had finished, to position some of the learnings that I had taken from sport and understand how to apply them in a business context.
