White Fern Melie Kerr: ‘I felt like my body had been taken over and I wasn’t myself’

Cricket was always a salve for Melie Kerr. But when she began struggling with her mental health, time away from the game was the best response. Now, back at the crease, the White Ferns star is helping others with her honesty and determination.

Her body carries the memory of childhood to the bowling crease: the fading evening light of a carless outer-Wellington cul-de-sac, the father perched behind the stumps, an accidental discovery. But this, more than a decade later, is the 2022 World Cup, a match the White Ferns need to win. Melie Kerr – then 21 but already a White Fern for five years – is the team’s best bowler, called on to arrest South Africa’s cruise to victory.

She starts inconspicuously, but the fifth ball invites Laura Wolvaardt to move across her stumps to glance it fine. It pitches on middle-leg, straightens, and beats the falling blade of South Africa’s best batter to trap her leg before. It is a catalyst. “Leg spinners pose problems much like love,” wrote poet Alan Ross, and every remaining ball of Kerr’s spell – three overs, two wickets – is loaded with the enchanting threat of cricket’s most difficult art, executed under enormous pressure.

But Kerr has always been the kind of cricketer onto whose shoulders falls the responsibility of the big moment. “If I’m batting or bowling,” she says, “I want to change the game, change the momentum.” A game that was dead had come alive, and though the White Ferns would lose in the final over, whenever Kerr was at the top of her mark, instead of merely spinning a ball, she seemed to be spinning the game to her will.

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‘I looked dead inside and that is how I felt’

It was remarkable she was spinning anything at all. Midway through 2020 Kerr noticed things had gone terribly amiss in her brain, and that cricket had become a crutch distracting her from the increasingly voluble voices in her head. She started seeing a psychologist, and was diagnosed with depression and anxiety, struggling through the 2020 Women’s Big Bash League for the Brisbane Heat in a Covid-bubble that kept her worried family locked on the wrong side of the Tasman.

She got home, her state of mind improving over the summer, and felt herself in a “pretty good place”. But as 2021 wore on, and a broken finger kept her from training, she tumbled into an even worse crisis, whose nadir came as she prepared for a winter White Ferns camp. The anguish was a thousand times worse than anything she’d experienced.

“There was this voice in my head screaming at me,” she remembers. “I felt like my body had been taken over and I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t sleeping… It just became this hole I felt I couldn’t get out of. It was continuous, it was intense.” No-one, other than a couple of close confidantes, including fellow Wellington White Fern Maddy Green, knew the extent of her pain.

Inside her disordered mind the Christchurch camp loomed as a salve. Cricket was never the cause of her mental health struggles; it was the one area of her life that remained unaffected, “where my brain stopped and I knew what I needed to do – hitting a ball, bowling a ball”. She arrived in Christchurch late at night with an early morning gym session to contemplate the following day.

Suddenly, it was too much. “I don’t know how I can physically function or cope any more. I just don’t know how I can face another day,” was all she remembers happening in her mind. “I looked dead inside and that is how I felt.” Green stepped in, alerting the New Zealand Cricket hierarchy to the crisis. The next day, she was flying – Green beside her – back to Wellington.

Kerr was delivered into the arms of those closest to her. A “family intervention” culminated in a speech by Kerr’s father, Robbie. It was the first time she’d seen him cry. Kerr prizes family – “my people” – above all else. “That was the real turning point for me… I have to get better for my family because I saw how broken they were.”

The next day she spent 12 hours with the crisis team at Wellington Hospital. She started seeing a psychologist and psychiatrist every week and got her medication sorted. She moved back home to be enveloped in the care of whānau – always sleeping next to someone, no car. She made herself unavailable for the 2021 White Ferns tour of England, insisting the true reasons for her withdrawal be made clear.

The next time she pulled on the black jersey wouldn’t be until a series against India that preceded the World Cup. Back in a good place, runs and wickets came as if by birthright. For Robbie, the hard work of her ongoing recovery had been “absolutely inspiring”

Surprise secret weapon

Perhaps no adult sportsperson is as connected to their childhood as closely as a bowler, whose intuitive idiosyncrasies when they first start performing this unnatural whirling of arms might be the point of difference that propels them into the game. When a 10-year-old Kerr tossed a few careless leg-breaks towards Robbie – formerly a Wellington cricketer and a former captain of the New Zealand indoor team – as he crouched on the Tawa street, he knew there was something there. “I said, ‘You better bowl a few more of those.’”

“That was how it all started,” Kerr, now 22, says. “By accident.” When, at about the same time, Kerr first saw the White Ferns on TV – the last-ball loss to Australia in the final of the 2010 T20 World Cup, Sophie Devine driving the final ball of the game for what would’ve been a score-tying four, only for the bowler to deflect it with her foot – her course was set. Nothing permeates a person’s sense of themselves quite like the idols of childhood, especially as, in the cricketing milieu of the Kerr household, Devine was also Kerr’s babysitter. “I just lived and breathed every moment of that game,” Kerr remembers.

She immediately set herself the goal of becoming a White Fern by the age of 18, writing it down on a piece of paper that survives in the family archives. She credits the example of her family – her mum, Jo Murray is a former Wellington player and the daughter of 13-test Black Cap Bruce Murray – with the work ethic that stretched the days to bursting with cricket.

Robbie remembers the days beginning, at his daughter’s urging, at the local nets, throwing countless balls her way before school. He recruited spin-bowling and batting coach Ivan Tissera to work with Kerr – that action has remained basically unchanged since he first saw it 12 years ago, Tissera says.

Her greatest weapon came by surprise. She was 12, playing indoor cricket and bowled what she thought was a legbreak, only to watch it “spin back and hit the guy on the body. I turned around and looked at Dad, so shocked, that I spun it the other way.” She’d discovered the wrong-un, a ball that, delivered from the back of the hand, spins in the opposite direction. When her wrist strengthened she learned to deliver it at will, making opponents look foolish ever since. Even Tissera can no longer pick it from Kerr’s hand. “She just laughs at me, ‘I got you.’”

At 14 she debuted for Wellington. The year after that, aged 15 and contemplating the 2017 ODI World Cup on the horizon, she asked Robbie if he thought she could make the White Ferns squad. “He was like, ‘You are a real outside chance.’”

Kerr remembers answering that she wanted to be that outside chance, a player taken along for the experience of touring, even if she never played. Of course, she did better than that. At 16 – two years ahead of her self-imposed timeline – she made her international debut. Ten wickets in seven matches against Pakistan and Australia were enough to get her on the plane to England. She played every match of the tournament, and was the team’s equal-highest wicket taker.

Tissera remembers her as a youngster, anxious to prove herself. “She’d always say, ‘I want to bat with Suzie Bates, I am good enough, I can bat number three, I can bat number four.’” Given a chance to open, in her 20th ODI, she broke the record for the highest score in women’s ODI cricket, unseating Australian legend Belinda Clark in scoring 232 not out; then she took five wickets.

She is now entrenched at number three, coming in behind an opening combination of childhood heroes, Devine and Bates. Kerr is now an automatic pick on the basis of either of her skills – her ODI batting average is a shade under 40, with the ball she averages 27.5 – let alone both. Already a leader in the team, there seems little doubt she will one day captain the side.

Making a real difference

Kerr spoke to Sunday from the midst of the 2022 edition of the Women’s Big Bash League in Australia. She knows time away from home can trigger lapses in her mental health, but a contingent of 15 family members had recently visited, and her older sister Jess – a White Fern, too – is also in the Brisbane squad. Mentally, she says, she is in a good place, even if “there’s still a heaviness that I hold with me from these emotions that I’ve had”.

She is determined to put those experiences to good use: “I hope that by sharing my story it can provide hope for someone else out there and help others feel less alone,” she says. That instinct drove the production of Treading Water, a series made in collaboration with mental health charity I Am Hope and film-maker Hamish Johns.

Beginning with her own story, each episode of the eight-part series, presented by Kerr, focuses on a different individual’s mental health journey – among them, a former top-class runner burned out by the grind, a childhood friend whose brother committed suicide, Robbie and his experience of watching a daughter suffer. The stories, Kerr says, “show that we are all human and we all go through stuff but that there is hope and you can get better”. She calls it “the best thing” she’s done in her life.

Robbie, interviewed by his daughter for the third episode, told Sunday that “a huge amount of people” had contacted him, not only about his daughter’s story, but also about his candid recall of what a mental health crisis looks like from the perspective of a parent. “I just had a text about 10 minutes before you rang from a local Tawa dad saying, ‘I’ve had similar things going on and this has really, really helped me, thank you.’”

Treading Water ranks far higher, for Robbie, than anything his daughter has done on the cricket field. “Scoring a hundred or taking five wickets is fine, but it’s not life-changing for people… This is making a real difference.” For Kerr that is where her passion lies: using her platform to make an impact on people’s lives.

For now, though, the foundations of that platform need tending. A series of three T20s and three ODIs against Bangladesh gets underway on Friday in Christchurch, with the T20 World Cup to look forward to in South Africa early next year, and the long-awaited first edition of the Women’s Indian Premier League following on its heels.

After that, there is The Hundred in England. Driven by the engine of T20 cricket, there is more female cricket than ever – to the extent, says Heath Mills of the New Zealand Cricket Players Association (NZCPA), in a bitter acknowledgement of progress, they are now having conversations about overworked female players, conversations that have long surrounded the men’s game.

Kerr is just grateful to have come into the game after its long-delayed full professionalisation had commenced, not least because of the support – from New Zealand Cricket and from the NZCPA – that wrapped around her when she needed it, which mightn’t have been as readily available to her amateur forebears. “It’s an amazing time to come into the women’s game and I guess I’ve just been born in the right era. It’s awesome to see the growth of women’s cricket.”

Treading Water is out now on outoftherough.nz

Where to get help

1737, Need to talk? Free call or text 1737 to talk to a trained counsellor.

I Am Hope iamhope.org.nz

Anxiety New Zealand 0800 ANXIETY (0800 269 4389), anxiety.org.nz

Lifeline 0800 543 354, lifeline.org.nz

Suicide Crisis Helpline 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO)

thelowdown.co.nz Web chat, email chat or free text 5626

Youthline 0800 376 633, free text 234, youthline.co.nz