GIRLS playing football is something of a novelty. Girls playing both football and cricket doubly so. Which means that people are fairly interested in current Matilda and Canberra United W-League player Ellyse Perry, who has represented Australia not just in football but in cricket too.

Self-described former - and, she says, probably still - tomboy Perry became interested in football and cricket watching her older brother learning to kick and bowl in the backyard. She tried her hand at both and proved so adept at them that she debuted in cricket for Australia in July 2007 aged just 16 and eight months. It made her the youngest ever cricketer, male or female, to represent Australia. Less than two weeks later, she debuted as a Matilda against Hong Kong, and even scored in the second minute.

They're not bad efforts considering most of us only dream of representing our country in one sport. And few of us considering doing it before we've turned 18. Now 18, Perry agrees that they're huge achievements at such a young age, but that, contrary to our expectations, they weren't part of a grand plan.

"When it happened, it all happened so quickly so it wasn't something I was building up towards," she says. "They both sprung up, but I guess they did take me by surprise, so I'm not sure that I had time to stop and think about them."

She's an all-rounder at cricket, but it also appears that she's an all-rounder at sport in general. With the exception of netball, she says.

"You always just muck around at the park with friends. I did used to play a lot of touch football, which I really loved, and still occasionally get to play, but not as often. I guess when you're at school, you get to do all the other sports. I played netball for a short time last year and I'm lucky I didn't choose that," she says, labelling the experience, and her attempts to master the sport's intricacies, "interesting".

When I suggest that so much sport would have meant a fair amount of driving around for her parents and that they must be grateful she didn't choose swimming with its early morning starts, Perry laughs.

"It's funny you say that because my mum was a swimmer," she says. "And where we live at the moment there's actually a pool 400m down the road, so it would have been much easier for them."

Given that she didn't choose the low-impact sport of swimming, how does she manage the impact on her body? A collaborative effort between her football and cricket coaching teams.

"They work together to ensure that I'm not getting burned out," she says. "I get a lot of my fitness from football so I don't do so much of it at cricket. My weights programs are pretty similar so one session tends to cover both sports." And, touch wood, she hasn't to date sustained any major injuries.

From a non-cricket playing perspective, the fitness requirements of the sports appear quite different, but Perry says not.

"I wouldn't downplay that standing on a cricket pitch for six hours at a time requires a reasonable amount of fitness, because it's harder than it looks," she says, before mentioning that there's a fair amount of overlap between the training drills, such as interval training and repeat sprints.

It still sounds like a lot to juggle, but Perry points to the co-operation between her coaches, the support of her sporty family, and the fact that she has never known anything different as what make it work.

"Cricket and football and school/uni have always just been a part of my life. It's not a big deal," she says simply.

Which is at least partly why, despite lots of speculation that she'll eventually have to choose on sport over the other, she just might be able to continue to manage both. Ability to juggle the two to date aside, cricket is, after all, a summer sport and football a winter one, which largely makes them complementary rather than competing interests.

"I'm more than happy to juggle them," she says. "It's not a hassle and sure things get busy, but I'm very lucky that I have a very supportive family. I'd love not to make a decision [about choosing one over the other]," she continues. "I'm not naïve enough to think that it may not occur, but at this point I'm just happy to enjoy it."

And that's perhaps the key. Whether or not it requires some serious planning and time management skills, Perry is living the dream. Or rather, living it doubly.

Still, there's not a lot of money in either sport, which has also got to make it doubly hard. But Perry has a different take. She lives at home, which means the minimal money is manageable. But, she says, it also means that the women get to have more of a life and greater balance and perspective beyond sport.

"For example, in our cricket team we have qualified physios, lawyers, psychologists, teachers," she says. "The men certainly wouldn't have the option to practise. It gives us more of a balance as well, in case we get sick of it or things don't pan out as we'd hoped." She points to the alcohol issues in such codes as rugby league, where players' worlds revolve solely and arguably unhealthily around football until it's all-sometimes all too suddenly-over.

For the record, Perry's own balance includes studying Economic and Social Sciences part time, which she absolutely relishes. "It's nice to have a bit of a reprieve from sport," she says. "It's nice to use your brain for something-I kind of felt like after school it had gone to mush."

Indeed, it's Perry's normalcy and level headedness that's most apparent in speaking to her. She herself points out that she's a "very normal teenager and not too different from the friends I went to school with. It's nice to be viewed as normal as well," she says.

Indeed, for someone who's achieved so much sporting-wise so young, Perry is very down to earth. Perhaps what we should all be marvelling at is not that she's a teenager representing Australia concurrently in two traditionally male-dominated sports, but that she's managed to find - and do - what she loves.