At age 15, Jenny was selected to the SA State Open and Junior softball teams, the SA State Open and Junior basketball teams, and the SA State Open and Junior netball teams. All within one calendar year.
It was the summer of 1969, on a Saturday afternoon when a 12-year-old Jenny Cheesman happened to walk past two softball officials and overheard their conversation.
That conversation at softball’s West Beach precinct changed Jenny Cheesman’s life for the next few years.
She heard one thing only – that the national selectors would seek to regenerate the Australian team with an injection of youth.
The World Cup was four years away. It was all this young athlete needed to know. “I’ve got four years to do this, I’ll be 16 by then,” she resolved.
A precocious conviction perhaps, after all she was 12 years old and playing D-Grade for Seacombe. Making that Australian softball team became a vision, a mental goal that drove her aggressively.
She rode her bike to her sister Joan’s A-grade trainings to watch their skills. Eventually invited to join, she shyly took up the offer. By 13, she was playing A-grade.
Jenny Cheesman’s teenage challenges were of a different nature to a normal teenager. At 15, within the one calendar year, she was selected to the SA State Open and Junior softball teams, the SA State Open and Junior basketball teams, and the SA State Open and Junior netball teams.
It’s an astonishing realisation of ambition, skill and tenacity.
On the diamond, by 1973 she was exhibiting impressive agility and speed at second base, which earned her first Australian Softball selection – and yes indeed, finally in 1974 at age 16, she was on that plane to Connecticut USA for the III World Softball Championships.
Talk about an injection of youth! Just as she had envisaged. Just as she had planned. Just as she had worked for.
Flanked by two other South Aussies, Jenny Cheesman helped Australia win the Softball World Cup bronze medal that year. Over the next 4-5 years, she also won the Kath Correll Medal for the SA Premier League’s Most Brilliant Player – twice.
And by then, there was the small matter of trying to complete Year 12 at Glengowrie High School.
Undeterred with a preoccupying overload of sport, and clearly catching the eye of Australian coaches, Jenny Cheesman was again named in the 1978 national team for the IV Softball World Cup in El Salvador.
But at this point, a choice, a choice that few ever get to make, became pressing: compelled to select the basketball court or the softball diamond.
The lure of basketball at the Olympic Games overrode her love of the softball diamond and she spent the next 13-14 years leading the Opals at four world championships and two Olympic Games.
