Back then, it was just whether she would need her cape for basketball or cricket.
And that is where I came in, fresh from journalism school and armed with questions about what it was like juggling both codes.
My timing was perfect. I got in on the ground floor and watched from the periphery as Bates went from a teenager with big dreams to one of the most accomplished cricketers in the world.
She reached greatness, but greatness never affected her.
In the most important of ways, she has remained that kid with the infectious enthusiasm who extracted maximum joy from the game she loved.
Her intelligence has always shone through in interviews. She is articulate, thoughtful and has a cheeky sense of humour that she is more than happy to turn on herself.
A broad smile is never far from her face, but there is another side to Bates the public does not always see.
Every so often, she would let a comment slip that hinted at just how hard she was on herself.
Champions do not get to the top by cruising, no matter how much natural talent they possess.
Bates is certainly driven, but that ambition has never spilled over into the sort of petty rivalries that can thrive in a cricket dressing room.
She takes just as much joy, perhaps more, in the success of her team-mates.
The support and inspiration she offers has been as reliable as her reverse cup over the years.
With such a glittering career in cricket, it is easy to forget she is a dual international.
She suited up for the Tall Ferns and represented her country at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. She also played professionally for the short-lived Christchurch Sirens in 2007.
Had the Sirens not folded after a year, Bates probably would have stuck with basketball.
But when she was appointed White Ferns captain in 2011, she shelved basketball to give cricket her full focus and was rewarded with a long run of individual success.
Cricket’s most celebrated publication, Wisden, named her the leading women’s cricketer in the world in 2015.
She was the first cricketer to win the ICC Women’s ODI and T20I cricketer of the year awards in the same year (2016) and was named player of the tournament at the 2013 Cricket World Cup.
Bates was one of the first women from New Zealand to crack the code and make a decent living from the sport. And her professionalism has helped pave the way for the next crop of players coming through.
But six or seven years ago, she shared a story that really underlines how far both Bates and the women’s game have come.
We were chatting at the University Oval when I took the chance to tease her about the large photo of a teenaged, cherub-faced Bates with bat in hand plastered on the side of one of the sponsored vehicles.
‘‘I can tell you a funny story about that, Adrian,’’ she said.
There was no money in the women’s game when she started out. Bates had written her phone number on the edge of her bat in the hope that if it got lost, someone would contact her to get it returned to the right-hander.
She was confident the photographer would edit the number out, but there it was, printed neatly and clearly visible, and doing laps of Dunedin.
