The University of Western Australia Cricket Club's first captain was Philip Le Couteur, a Victorian Rhodes Scholar and Oxford Blue who was the first lecturer in philosophy at UWA.

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In 2005 the club’s committee decided to name the Cricketer of the Year award after a distinguished former University cricketer, and so from that season onwards the winner has been presented with the Le Couteur Medal.  Some club members may have been surprised that the medal was to bear the awkward-to-pronounce French-sounding name of UWA’s first Lecturer in Philosophy who had been born in Victoria and went to Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar from that state.  But there was no doubt about the significance of Philip Le Couteur in the club’s history as its founder and first captain, or of his all-round prowess, both as a cricketer and as an individual. A special effort was made to contact all previous winners of the Cricketer of the Year Award since 1974-75, which according to the club’s printed annual reports was the first season in which the award was made.  They were invited to attend the end-of-season dinner in 2005 and the majority were there to receive their retrospective Le Couteur Medal, including the 1974-75 winner, Earle Scarff, who was also designated as the guest speaker for the evening.  A further retrospective calculation was later made to designate the winner for every season prior to 1974-75 in which the club has participated in the WACA competition.

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The calculation for the Le Couteur Medal has sometimes varied but is generally based on the following:

 

1 point for each run

15 points for each wicket*  (See Note below)

10 Points for each catch or stumping

Bonus 20 points for a century 

Bonus 20 points for a 5 or more wicket haul

 

The medal is awarded to the player from any grade who has the highest number of points in all Premier Cricket grade matches played by them during the season.  In the club’s first season (1913-14), Le Couteur scored 527 runs, took 84 wickets (including five in an innings seven times) and made 18 catches.  His tally of 2,107 points is higher than any other player has achieved in over a hundred years since!

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Note: Season 2020/21 onward has updated points to have 20 points per wicket to align with common idea of 20 runs is equivalent to one wicket.

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