As of Thursday morning, every member of her Breakers team will be able to pursue the sport full-time after a landmark move by Cricket NSW turned Broadbent's side into Australia's first professional domestic women's sporting team.

In less than 10 years NSW cricketers have gone from not earning a cent to enjoying a minimum wage of $35,000, with leading international players now capable of pocketing upwards of $100,000 a season.

The move follows Cricket Australia's increase of total women's payments last April, which boosted minimum Southern Stars payments to $40,000 and maximum retainers to $65,000.

It also follows last month's announcement by Netball Australia to share a pool of almost $5.5 million among 80 players throughout the new National Netball League.

Broadbent and her four full-time staff now have the ability to conduct training sessions during office hours before the domestic season, which starts against South Australia at the Gabba next Thursday.

She still recalls the days of her career when playing cricket as a woman, and winning the 1998 World Cup, left her out of pocket.

"Representing your state team, you're probably paying about 1500, 2000 [dollars] to go away, that's not including the uniform and your blazers," Broadbent said.

"They'd told us on the [1998 World Cup] tour that we'd get a bill for the tour and we're all like, 'You win a World Cup and you've got to pay for it'.

"Then a publican just came out of nowhere and we were just told that our bills were paid for and that we didn't have to pay them.

"We weren't getting much publicity back in the '90s as well – for someone to do that and I never knew who that person was either."

Breakers veteran Alex Blackwell never had to pay her way, but Australia's most capped player said it wasn't until about six years ago that she started earning a crust from cricket.

The 33-year-old pursued a medical degree after leaving high school, but abandoned plans to be a doctor in 2007 to remain a cricketer, and instead studied genetic counselling.

Blackwell, who started her international career alongside twin sister Kate, admits she never thought women's cricket would become professional during her playing career.

"We used to rock up at Cricket NSW at about 5.30, ready for a 6pm training session; the Waugh brothers and the other NSW Blues were leaving at that time having had an amazing training session during the day," Blackwell said.

"They can go home, put some dinner on and have a regular life, whereas we were actually starting our training after a full day at uni or a full day at work.

"We actually spoke about that at the same time we were playing as the Waugh brothers, we looked up to them being twins. We used to dream about, imagine if we could be like them."

Recently retired WNBL legend Lauren Jackson said she hoped the Breakers becoming professional would be followed by other sporting codes.

"It's brilliant for women's sport, because of what's happened with the women's AFL and the netball, things like this are going to keep happening," Jackson said.

"The difference between men and women is that men actually earn so much more that they don't ever have to worry about working again.

"There's so many other issues around this, you focus more on your sport when you're young, you don't focus so much on education so when you stop playing you have to find new skills and develop new skills and it's difficult to start over."