Two Player-of-the-Match performances in her first four internationals. A six off the final ball to win both her first T20I and her first ODI - the only player in the world to do that. A T20I strike rate of 157.42, South Africa's highest and the global game's fifth-highest. For someone who is "not good with numbers", Kayla Reyneke is doing all right.
Sure, she is only 11 internationals into her senior career, has faced only 101 balls in T20Is, and is only 20 years old, but her potential and ability to perform under pressure make Reyneke arguably the most exciting young talent in women's cricket to come out of South Africa's pipeline.
Remember when Reyneke was at the crease in her maiden T20I and the scores were level with a ball to go? It was as recent as February, but we'll remind you. She could have dropped the ball and run the single the team needed to seal the win but chose to go big and sent the ball over the boundary for six instead.
Why? "I like to hit a ball far and whenever I have a session, I always ask the coach, 'Can I do a bit of power-hitting?" Reyneke says from South Africa's pre-T20 World Cup camp in Pretoria. "It's about nurturing the skill, but also about seeing how I can do it under pressure and practising it. So when the time comes, when the pressure's on, [I know] what I am going to do."
Fast forward six and a half weeks and Reyneke found herself in exactly the kind of situation she had been simulating. Chasing 268, South Africa needed six off the last ball to win an ODI against New Zealand and take vital Women's Championship points. Suzie Bates went around the wicket and delivered it quick and full. Reyneke was thinking only one thing: "Just swing. I literally thought about just that."
She cleared her front leg and sent the ball over long-on to give South Africa a two-wicket win. That was just the second six in the match and Reyneke had hit them both, which speaks to a skill that she has already proved to be outstanding at. In 2026, Reyneke has the fourth-most sixes in women's T20Is, and she is also South Africa's third-highest six-hitter in the format, ever.
So, about those numbers…
It's the ones from school Reyneke says she never liked. Still, she is considering further studies in business management. "I hated school," she says. "All those accounting books were things I really struggled with."
Instead, she spent time as the only girl in a boys' team at Laerskool Mikro in Kuils River in the Western Cape. This was in the 2010s, when cricket was a growing sport among girls but not so much in Reyneke's neck of the woods. "It was very rare to get a girl in a boys team," she says. "It was only when I got to about Grade 11 [at Belville High School] I saw that there were more girls. If you go into Gauteng and Jo'burg, there seemed to be more girls on that side."
She also dabbled in other sports, particularly the javelin throw. Reyneke was the Under-15 national champion after throwing 45.97 metres and at the time was also in the Western Province U-19 cricket set-up. Soon, she had a choice to make. "I needed to decide between cricket and javelin," she said. "With athletics in general, it's tough to make a living out of it. But when you look at cricket, there's so much more opportunities and still it's growing. It's so exciting. So I chose cricket."
It paid off. Reyneke was in the provincial senior side as a teenager and part of South Africa's U-19 squad that played in the inaugural edition of the tournament in 2023. There, she was South Africa's leading wicket-taker and ninth overall in an otherwise disappointing campaign. Oh, we forgot to mention - she can bowl too!
Reyneke hopes her offspin will make her into a "genuine allrounder", and the signs so far are positive. In 2025 she was again South Africa's leading bowler at the U-19 World Cup, third overall. She was also the team's captain, though the last of those puzzled her. "I was never really a leader," she says. "I only captained my last U-19 national week at Western Province, but that was it. I actually don't know what coach Dinesha [Devnarain] saw in me, but there must have been something."
It turned out to be something Reyneke enjoyed. "You learn how to take ownership obviously of yourself and your own space and other people as well. It was challenging in some ways when I needed to think about certain scenarios in the game but it showed me what I can work on in terms of how I approach and how I think about the game," she says. "And then, obviously, the different conditions, how you read it as a captain, and it was a good challenge."
South Africa advanced to the final of that tournament, and beat Australia along the way in a match where Reyneke had a major say. She took 1 for 20 in four overs and then scored a run-a-ball 26 in the chase, and though she rubbed Australia's noses in it then, it's still an Australian she most wants to meet at her first senior World Cup.
"I'd say Ashleigh Gardner," she says when asked which of the major international stars she was looking forward to coming across. "And Suzie Bates also. I just want to have a chat with her cause I haven't had that opportunity."
That's the same Suzie Bates she hit for six to win her first ODI, the one who is part of the defending champions outfit that beat South Africa in the last senior T20 World Cup final. But what's a little rubbing shoulders with a rival? And for all the stars in her eyes, Reyneke is also laser-focused on the same thing the rest of South Africa are: winning a white-ball world title.
"That's the main thing we're speaking about, even if we don't want to think too far ahead," she says. "The way the girls are training at the moment, it's insane. There's so much focus. Even when there's a water break, we chat cricket, and then we are very focused and very specific. It just gives me goosebumps because I think we really have a good chance of making it to the end."
That's a sentiment shared across this country of 66 million, who have watched team after team go to tournament after tournament and raise hope after hope. It's often come to nothing, but it's not for young Reyneke to carry that burden. Instead, she's still soaking in the feeling of playing with the superstars she once asked for selfies, like Laura Wolvaardt, and the ones she might have shared an Olympic stage with.
Tazmin Brits and Nadine de Klerk were also javelin throwers, which explains something about the strongest arms in the South African outfield.
Have the trio compared notes? "We actually haven't talked about that. We had a brief conversation, but it wasn't about technique or anything like that," Reyneke says. "We might need to have a little competition amongst each other and see!"
For the record, de Klerk threw the javelin around 45 metres too, and Brits, who represented South Africa at the 2007 World Youth Championships and 2009 African Junior Athletics Championships, has a best of 56.55 metres. More numbers for Reyneke and the rest of us to think about.
