A teenage girl's period starts in the middle of a match. She sprints off the pitch, and her coach appears confused rather than concerned. Cat Black remembers thinking, 'You don't get it at all. I'm playing a sport where no one understands how I'm feeling.' That humiliating afternoon is now reshaping how female cricketers across Britain get kitted out.
Cat, 17, and her older sister Honor, 18, built Maiden Cricket out of that moment, a brand made from scratch around female bodies rather than a scaled-down version of men's gear.
For decades, men's sportswear has benefited from millions of dollars invested in performance fabrics and fit. Nobody had thought to ask what a teenage girl actually needs as her body changes, especially when it comes to cricket whites. The sisters have juggled GCSEs, A Levels and a nerve-shredding pitch on Dragons' Den trying to fix it.
Why 43% of Teenage Girls Drop Out of Cricket
Honor and Cat call the years between 14 and 16 the 'struggle zone'. It's the point where so many girls quietly give up on sport.
Women in Sport research shows a huge proportion of girls who once considered themselves sporty disengage once they leave primary school. The sisters point to a shortage of girls' teams, a lack of female coaches and kit that ignored their changing bodies.
'It toughened us up a little bit, but I think it put a dampener on our cricket experience,' says Honor. 'Not being able to have kit in which we felt confident made us reach the point of feeling like we just don't even enjoy this anymore.'
How Maiden Cricket Fixes Sexist Gear
Standard cricket whites were never built with periods, growth spurts or sun-drenched visibility in mind.
Maiden Cricket set out to correct that oversight.
Their White Test Match Trousers are non-see-through with built-in coverage shorts, removing an anxiety that has followed generations of female cricketers around the boundary.
The Navy Training Trousers use popper adjustments instead of a fixed waistband, because, as Honor puts it, 'girls grow at such different rates'.
The sisters have also challenged uniform convention itself. If Wimbledon now allows women to wear navy, they argue, professional cricket has no excuse to keep clinging to an all-white rulebook that was never designed with them in mind.
'All of the small details that it wouldn't have taken a genius to think of,' Honor adds.
From School Exams to Dragons' Den
The idea started at the family dinner table, when the sisters told their businessman father they were ready to quit cricket for good. His suggestion that they build a solution sent them straight to their bedroom, where they compared school PE kits and sketched designs within a fortnight. Then came a designer, a factory trip to Portugal to source fabric, and finally the Dragons' Den lift.
'It's the most nerve-wracking thing we've ever done in our whole entire lives,' says Honor. Cat, midway through her GCSEs at the time, has been just as open about what the experience means personally. 'Social anxiety really got the better of me when I was younger, I was so shy, but Maiden and cricket have really helped with that,' she says.
@bbc The Dragons are bowled over by sisters Honor & Cat’s cricket uniform pitch 🏏 #DragonsDen #Business #Entrepreneur #Investment #Cricket Dragons’ Den: Aspiring entrepreneurs have one chance to make their dreams come true when they pitch their business idea to five multimillionaire investors. It’s make or break time.
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Honor and Cat have already done something British cricket manufacturers failed to do for decades and this sisterhood is far from finished.
