Alicia Scholes interview: People say seeing me play is like watching Dad on a netball court

One thing that is impossible to miss when looking at a photo of the London Pulse netball team is the sudden gap that appears as the eye runs along the squad. That is where Alicia Scholes is standing. You can just about make out the top of her head.

At 5ft 4in, the wing attack is noticeably small for a sport in which height can proffer significant advantage. She is nearly a foot shorter than her team-mate Olivia Tchine; indeed, she cedes more than five inches to the next smallest player on the Pulse roster. And when she speaks about her growing reputation in the game, it is clear that mention of her height – or lack of it – is something she is well used to.

“Loads of people have told me I’m too small to play,” she says. “Always have. From around the time I started in high school, my height was something that was there constantly in the background. If I’m honest, it was always in my head that I’d be too small, that because of that I’d never make an international. I’ve always wanted to prove to people it didn’t matter, because I’m faster, quicker round the court. What I’ve tried to do all my career is use it to prove people wrong.”

Whatever her scale, when it comes to playing netball, Scholes has a singular advantage. It is there in her surname: her father is Paul Scholes. And seeing her in action, precisely picking out passes, knowing exactly where team-mates are on court, able to spot gaps and spaces others simply cannot see, it is evident she has become heir to much of the extraordinary spatial awareness that made Scholes Snr the finest midfielder of his generation.

“Maybe it’s inherited, I don’t know,” she says of the striking similarity in the way father and daughter are able to read a game and plot its geometry. “People do say after they’ve seen me play that it’s like watching Dad on a netball court.”

Paul Scholes is not the only former Manchester United player to have a family link to netball. His “Class of ‘92” team-mates Gary and Phil Neville’s sister Tracey was a leading player, earning 81 international caps. She was also coach of England for four years, memorably steering the team to gold at the 2018 Commonwealth Games.

“The really weird thing was, when I first started, there was this rumour that she was my godmother,” she says. “She isn’t.”

It was certainly nothing to do with Neville that she became intrigued by the sport. The pair had never even met then.

“It started when I was eight or nine and a friend said come along to the Oldham Ball Hall,” she recalls. “I loved it from the word go. As I got into high school, I started doing better. With me, it was something I was good at, so I stuck with it.”

As she progressed through the game, playing for Oldham Hulme Grammar School, then county and national age-group levels, the family support was unwavering. “The message from my parents was always: do what you enjoy,” she says. “It didn’t have to be sport. If I wanted to play the violin, they would have encouraged that.”

Her father appeared to enjoy her progress almost as much as she did. “He’d come and watch, though he’d never be right on the touchline shouting out advice like some dads, he always dropped back a bit. He was never too heavy, never interfered, just supported me, wanted me to keep enjoying it.”

He was there when she first broke into the fringes of the first team at her local Super League club, Manchester Thunder, in the 2021 season. And it was while she was there, often on the sidelines, that she recalls her father first giving her a significant piece of advice. She remembers it largely because she decided to do the exact opposite of what he said.

“I grew up with Dad playing for the same team for so many years,” she says of Paul’s one-club career. “And I wanted to be at Thunder all my career. But it was becoming ever more clear, I had to move to get game time. ‘Stay with them, it will come’, that was his advice. But I had to do what’s best for me, I had to get court time, so I signed for Pulse.”

And she has been proved right in making the move to London. This is the third season since she signed semi-professional terms with the club and headed south. In that time, she has become a regular starter, playing in front of packed crowds at the Copper Box Arena. Last season she was integral to the charge up the Super League, which concluded in defeat in the final against Loughborough Lightning. So good was she, her international debut came against New Zealand last September.

“I think court time is everything for confidence. Having a place, knowing you are going to start, everything just gets much easier,” says Scholes, who is as feisty a competitor as her father was.

The Pulse have made the play-offs this year, too, and play Loughborough in Saturday’s semi-final – but coming second again is not something she believes would be good enough. “This season has been the most pressure and expectation on us. I think last year a lot of people were surprised we came second, so everyone has been gunning for us this year. Personally I feel as a team, we’re not quite there. We’ve been a bit inconsistent, two or three strong games, then an off one. We need to find consistency going into the semis, focus.”

However it pans out, when the season is over, she intends to spend the rest of the summer at her parents’ place in Oldham. There, during the day she supplements her netball earnings working in the gym in Manchester that her brother runs. And it is when she is back up north she concedes that, in one aspect at least, her father had a point when he counselled against a move away. “I’m a home girl. I do miss Manchester a lot.”