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March 25, 2009
By JOSHUA ROBINSON
LAUDERHILL, Fla. — Sandwiched between a soccer game and a barbecue, the Montgomery College cricket team edged closer and closer to victory. And when at last it came, after four days of wickets, overs and sixes, the players were jubilant. Just as cricketers do from Australia to Antigua, they snatched the wooden cricket stumps out of the grass and waved them around their heads in mad celebration.
The players felt they had claimed more than the three-foot trophy for the first American College Cricket spring break championship. In their minds they had brought their sport one step closer to the American mainstream.
Though cricket counts its fans by the billion worldwide, the sport does not register a pulse in the United States. Of the five teams in attendance at this experimental event last weekend — Montgomery, from Maryland; Boston University; Carnegie Mellon, from Pittsburgh; the University of South Florida and the University of Miami — most exist only as social clubs. None of them have club team status, and the sport is not officially recognized by the N.C.A.A.
“This is an opportunity for us to really show athletic directors at a Division I level that cricket matters, cricket is a big sport and cricket has a marketing capability in this country,” said Sumantro Das, an all-rounder and junior at Boston University, who learned to play as a child in India.
With only a few weeks’ notice, the five teams did what many college students do this time of year: they packed their sunscreen and headed to Florida. Nearly 60 players drove or flew at their own expense to the lush cricket pitches of Central Broward Regional Park. They played Twenty20, a version of cricket in which many stuffy traditions are left behind and matches are completed in about three hours instead of taking up to five days. The only custom-built cricket stadium in the United States stands in this park, but securing the 5,000-seat facility was far too rich a luxury for the tournament’s shoestring budget. Competing on the park’s manicured fields was already an upgrade over the converted soccer fields and tennis courts the players were used to.
“I wanted them to see the stadium to know what they are playing for,” said Lloyd Jodah, the founder and president of American College Cricket. “That is where we want to be next year.”
The idea for the college tournament came to him last year as he campaigned to have cricket included in the Olympics. Standing on Wall Street with a cricket bat in one hand and petitions in the other, Jodah, 50, an immigrant from Guyana who works selling health club memberships, met Kalpesh Patel, a Jamaican business student from the University of Miami.
Once Jodah heard how difficult it was for college cricketers to find regular games, he began toying with the idea of a nationwide organization for collegiate clubs and founded American College Cricket. He made a group on Facebook as a way to reach out to players.
“We always had the desire to play, but there was no real framework for us to get involved,” Patel said. “So this idea gave us the push to get involved with the most competitive form of the game.”
Jodah and Nino DiLoreto, 62, a former soccer player from Abruzzi, Italy, spent many evenings tracking down college cricket players, and the group swelled to more than 500 members.
“We could have waited till next year to have the tournament and maybe taken more time to organize it,” Jodah said. “But it was important to actually do something this year, to have something to show for ourselves.”
Invitations went out and T-shirts were printed.
At the Boston University Cricket Club, expenses for the trip became the subject of six- and seven-hour meetings. After much deliberation, and financial help from the university, the roughly dozen members agreed that the opportunity to play for a long weekend was worth $400 each.
“Putting up that kind of money, especially when most of us have none, was a big decision for us,” Das said. “But it was significant because who else is doing anything for cricket in this country?”
Unlike a couple of the teams, which had snazzy uniforms, the University of South Florida contingent did not even have a team until a few weeks ago; they were just a few guys who played a regular pickup game. They settled on sweatpants and green T-shirts from the college bookstore. Not having names on their shirts caused a few awkward moments when a player would run to the borrowed picnic table/scorer’s table with no idea of which of his new teammates was batting next.
But the players all knew the finer points of cricket etiquette, lilting cries of “Ball” or “Shot” into the wind after each pretty play — high cricket praise that requires no adjectives. Other cheers followed in at least a half-dozen different languages and dialects, but instructions on the field were usually in English. Miami players adopted an English-only rule after a few plays were botched in translation.
Nearly all the players were born abroad. And even though the sport had a rich history in the United States until World War II, it is still widely seen here as an obscure game played exclusively by foreigners. Most who play it here are from countries that belonged to the British Commonwealth.
The aim of this tournament, Jodah and DiLoreto explained, was to make cricket more accessible by growing its college identity, something that rubbed off on the Miami players as they belted Hurricanes chants.
“We’re not playing on Saturdays for the fun of it anymore,” Patel said. “We’re playing for our school.”
After the championship match, in which South Florida could not handle Montgomery’s firepower, the local fans — three Jamaican retirees sitting in the shade — nodded in approval, clapping politely.
Many of the players said the four-day adventure had spurred them to continue growing the sport when they return to campus. And nine years after moving to Maryland from his native Pakistan, Montgomery’s captain, Adil Bhatti, said he hoped to take it one step further. He wants to try out for the United States national team, which plays in International Cricket Council tournaments.
“We live here and we play cricket here,” Bhatti said. “I would absolutely want to represent the U.S.”
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