Meet Elena Tice, Ireland's dual international
It also wasn’t her first time representing Ireland at the highest level in sport.
In her teens, Tice played cricket for Ireland, bowling leg-spin. Picked in the XI to play the Twenty20 International against the Netherlands in 2011 at 13 years and 272 days, she became the youngest international player ever in the format. (She is now third on the list behind her compatriots Gaby Lewis and Lucy O'Reilly.) Two days later in the one-day international against the same team, she took the record for being the second-youngest to play ODIs.
Congratulations to Elena Tice who was part of the @irishhockey side that finished as silver medallists at #HWC2018 - she also played for @IrishWomensCric and was the third youngest ODI debutant of all time at 13 years, 274 days! 🥈 pic.twitter.com/rUCZJAFMSn
— ICC (@ICC) August 6, 2018
In 2014, she featured in the ICC Women's World T20 2014 in Bangladesh as well – an experience she describes as “absolutely special”.
Today, as a 20-year-old, Tice is the proud winner of the silver medal and part of the remarkable group of Irish women whose fairy-tale progress in the Hockey World Cup won hearts and gave the sport in their country a big boost. But, it all started with cricket, she says.
“Cricket was the first sport I really played. I was throwing the ball around the garden for as long as I can remember,” Tice told ICC Cricket 360, opening up about her journey and her life as a dual international.
The ICC Women's World T20 2014 was her cricket career highlight, she explains. And the decision to choose hockey over cricket the hardest one.
The last of Tice's 40 appearances for the cricket team was in August 2015, in a T20I against Australia in Dublin. “It was a really, really hard decision to choose hockey at the time, but now, looking back, it was the right one,” she says. It was, after all, the second dream she got to live.