Jess Kerr

Cricket runs deep in her family. Her parents, Robert James Kerr and Johanna Murray, both played domestic cricket for Wellington, and her grandfather Bruce Murray appeared in a small number of Tests for New Zealand. Sport first took her in another direction, though. In her early teenage years she was a talented middle-distance runner, but health problems forced her to step away from athletics.

Her breakthrough came with Wellington Blaze in the 2019-20 Super Smash, when she took more wickets than anyone else as the side won the title. That form earned her a New Zealand debut in 2020, and she was capped in both the one-day and Twenty20 formats that year. A central contract followed not long after.

Once mainly a new-ball option, Kerr has developed into a more complete player who can be trusted at different phases of an innings and who now contributes reliably with the bat. On New Zealand's three-match ODI tour of India in 2024, she finished as her team's top wicket-taker even though she featured in only 2 of the games. The 2024-25 Super Smash proved a standout campaign: she scored 326 runs at an average of 36.22 with a strike rate of 119.41, the second-highest tally in the competition, and also claimed 14 wickets at 16.28 apiece, placing her fifth among the bowlers.