Women's Super League (cricket)
The Women's Super League, commonly known as the Kia Super League for sponsorship reasons, was a semi-professional women's Twenty20 cricket competition in England and Wales operated by the England and Wales Cricket Board. The competition featured six franchise teams, partnered with a variety of county teams and boards and universities, and was envisaged as a means to bridge the gap between amateur domestic cricket and the increasingly professional international game.
The KSL launched in 2016, with each team playing five group stage matches in a round-robin format, followed by a finals day; this was increased to ten group matches in 2018, following the ECB abandoning their initial plans to expand the tournament by also incorporating a 50-over competition.
The KSL ended after the 2019 season, ahead of the intended launch of the ECB's new format, The Hundred, and its city-based men's and women's franchises. Western Storm ended the competition as the most successful team with two titles, in 2017 and 2019. Southern Vipers and Surrey Stars won one title each, in 2016 and 2018 respectively.
History
The England and Wales Cricket Board announced their plans for the Women's Cricket Super League in June 2015, stating they would invest £3 million over four years. The competition would launch with six teams playing in a Twenty20 format, with the initial intention to add a 50-over competition in 2017. The ECB received 28 applications to host teams in the first stage of bidding, with the process subsequently moving to an interview stage. The six successful bids were announced in January 2016. The ECB hoped that the WCSL would develop as a semi-professional competition, with the intention of bridging the gap between the amateur Women's County Championship and international cricket, for which England players are centrally contracted as professionals.It was decided ahead of the 2017 season that the planned 50-over competition would not after all take place, with the ECB and the franchises preferring to concentrate their resources on developing the existing Twenty20 format. For the 2018 season, the group stage of the competition was doubled in size, with each team now facing every other team home and away for a total of ten group matches.
In 2018, the ECB announced the planned launch of The Hundred in 2020, a new hundred-ball format competition to be played by newly-created city-based franchises with both men's and women's teams. In conjunction with this, it was also announced that the WCSL would be scrapped after the 2019 season. It was replaced with a new regional domestic structure for women's cricket in England and Wales, encompassing The Hundred, the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy and the Charlotte Edwards Cup.