A tactical selection by then-New Zealand coach Steve Jenkin? Another Bates grin appears. “He probably caught wind [of the US idea] and was trying to rope me into committing to cricket. A smart decision because once I played for the White Ferns, I never looked back.”
Jenkin did, though, afford Bates an 18-month sabbatical to pursue her Olympic dream. “I think he realised that I really loved basketball and that if he’d told me I couldn’t play, I might have said ‘stuff you’ to cricket!”
So Bates headed to Beijing 2008 with the Tall Ferns. Despite just one victory, memories of that trip are among her most cherished. Her team-mates struck up friendships with the US men’s team’s security and they all joined the Dream Team’s gold medal celebrations.
“We were with LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Jason Kidd, Chris Bosh – for a basketball fan it was an unbelievable experience. Now I say it out loud, I have to pinch myself.
“I was kind of star-struck and overwhelmed. I remember some of the other girls telling them I played cricket – they had no idea what cricket was. I was like, ‘I’m a basketballer, be quiet!’
“One of them said, ‘Oh, so you play a game for five days and don’t get a result?’ I was like, ‘We don’t actually play Tests, but yeah, that is cricket’.”
One of them? “Dwyane Wade!”
Olympic dream lives on
Since then, women’s cricket has evolved rapidly. She is, in equal measure, grateful to have participated in the amateur era and glad for the more recent professionalisation.
“At the 2017 World Cup in England, I was thinking, ‘This isn’t sustainable’. I was at an age – 27 or 28 – where most people that I’d played with had had to retire. Either they could no longer pay the mortgage, or they had to think about another career.”
So while Bates is no fan of franchise drafts – “you’re a commodity putting your name out there. The personal aspect gets lost” – she appreciates that the development was perfectly timed for her career.
Yet another beaming grin appears as she says: “I’m doing exactly the same thing I did when I was 18 – it’s just that now I get paid a lot more money for it!
“In any other job you have to move your way up the ladder and upskill, whereas I feel like I’ve been doing the same thing, just everything around me has changed.”
Does she fancy another dart at the Olympics in Los Angeles 2028, where cricket will feature? “It’s day-by-day at the moment,” Bates says. But her eyes are dancing and she adds: “It would be quite cool, though, 20 years later, to go to the Olympics for a different sport.”