Mary-Anne Musonda

Mary-Anne Musonda (born 4 August 1991) is a Zimbabwean cricketer and the current captain of the women's national cricket team.

She is a right-handed batter and an off-beak bowler.

She also has a master's degree in Development Finance from the University of Cape Town.

Musonda was born in Harare to a Zimbabwean mother and a Zambian father.

The youngest in a family of four children, and also the only girl, she began her education at Hermann Gmeiner Primary School in Harare.

From 2004, she attended Kwekwe High School at Kwekwe, in the Midlands province, where she passed all of her 10 subjects.

At high school, Musonda also participated in a lot of sports.

Initially, she focused on hockey.

However, her hockey coach was a friend of the cricket coach, Craig Majawa.

In Form One, he recruited her to play cricket, and became her first cricket coach.

She also played basketball, volleyball, and netball.

Although Zimbabwe Cricket was introducing girls' cricket at schools, Musonda's high school did not then have a girls' team.

"I started playing with the boys," she told ESPNcricinfo in 2022, "I played with [them] for a term or two, and really fell in love with cricket. I never went back to hockey."

In school cricket, Musonda was an all-rounder.

She started out bowling pace, but later switched to off spin after suffering an injury.

Majawa encouraged her to believe she would be "an excellent cricketer", and she modelled her game around that of her favourite player, Charlotte Edwards.

Less than a year after Musonda took up cricket, her school established a girls' team, and some of its members competed in provincial trials.

She was included in a probable, but unofficial, 13 for the national women's team squad.

Musonda went on her first tour as part of the national team in 2006.

With the support of her mother, she decided to combine playing cricket with the pursuit of her studies.

Due to her school commitments, she did not initially participate in all of the national team's activities.

Musonda's first tour with the national team was in December 2006, when she travelled to Nairobi, Kenya, for the African qualifying leg of the 2009 Women's Cricket World Cup.

It was also the first time the national team had ever been involved in a full international competition.

Zimbabwe won that qualifying leg, and Musondo enjoyed the experience, but did not play in any of the team's three matches.

School commitments prevented her from attending the ensuing World Cup Qualifier in South Africa in February 2008.

In 2015, she obtained a Bachelor of Commerce degree with honours from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.

In 2018, she completed a Master of Commerce degree in Development Finance from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town.

Between finishing her bachelor's degree and starting her master's course, Musonda looked unsuccessfully for a job in Zimbabwe.

After finishing the master's degree, she returned to Zimbabwe but decided not to look for work immediately.

Instead, she devoted herself to cricket.

A year later, that decision paid off when she was appointed captain of the national team.

While studying in South Africa for her bachelor's degree, Musonda played domestic cricket for KwaZulu-Natal Inland.

In July 2019, she was one of four Zimbabwe women cricketers barred by the International Cricket Council (ICC) from participating in a Global Development Squad due to play in England against Women's Cricket Super League teams, following the ICC's suspension of Zimbabwe Cricket earlier in the month.

In 2020, Musonda told Women's CricZone, "Growing up I wanted to have a white collar job, and be involved in marketing. But at the end of high school I then felt that I could take cricket seriously."

She was also driven to conquer both academia and the cricket world.

Following her graduation from high school, Musonda returned to Harare, where she undertook her Advanced Levels at St. John's High School, Emerald Hill.

Very little top level domestic women's cricket was played in Zimbabwe until the 2020–21 season, when Zimbabwe Cricket launched both the Fifty50 Challenge and the Women's T20 Cup.

For both of those tournaments, Musonda was recruited by the Rhinos team.

In the inaugural Women's T20 Cup, she was player of the tournament.

In April 2023, it was announced that Musonda would play for Scorchers in that season's Women's Super Series in Ireland.