By Orville Hall
Having read Tom Melville’s commentary on “Show me the Americans”, as he referred to the cricket games which were played in Florida, I wish to take another view of what transpired in Fort Lauderdale this past weekend. Thousands of cricket-loving fans packed into the Central Broward Regional Park to witness history in the making; an ICC- sanctioned T20 series between The West Indies and New Zealand. By all accounts, it was a resounding success.
Part of the sell out audience at the game between West Indies and Zealand last Saturday. Photo by Shiek Mohamed
I will cede Mr. Melvin’s point of contention, that there weren’t too many Americans in the stands for these games, but no one expected that to be the case, at least, not yet. We still have a long way to go in refining this game to meet the expectations of the American public, and the educational process has already begun.
It began about two years ago, when Jamie Harrison, an American school teacher from Baltimore, was introduced to the game while taking his students on a tour. Realizing that the kids were having so much fun “playing” the game that day, he brought the idea back to the classroom, and continued working with his students who were eager to learn more about this “foreign” game. Harrison, along with a few others, recognized the need for getting this sport into the school system, and the United States Youth Cricket Association was born. To date, the USYCA has distributed over 1000 cricket sets to schools all across the USA.
The results are already being manifested in places like Maryland, Kansas and Massachusetts. This, in my opinion, is the model that we must implement if we expect to see an elevation of the game in this country. There is absolute no reason why we can operate on parallel tracks; satisfying the needs of the expat community by bringing in the International games, while introducing the game at the elementary level, so that we can have a “feeder” system, where young American adults can begin to accept the game as one of the mainstream sports. Once the kids begin to show interest in the sport, the school administrators will have to sit up and take notice. Funds for cricket will be included in the budgets, grounds will be provided for them to play, parents will begin to notice, the American media will begin the cover it, and the process would have begun.
It’s not a simple task by any means, but it is surely a workable one, and one that has begun to pay dividends in some of the schools around the country. Several years ago, soccer was at a similar stage in this country, and look where it is today. I would hope that what transpired in Florida this past weekend will be a microcosm of even better things to come, as we strive to satisfy the insatiable appetite of our expat communities, while encouraging our school-age kids to adopt the game as their own.
6 Comments
Roger, the short answer is that NONE of this was done. Poor planning and an overall lack of vision wasted a great opportunity for cricket development.
Here’s another question: what happened to all of that money, spent in the United States, from the two matches? Is that going to be invested in US cricket development, or did the two full member nations haul it away like so much pirate booty?
I agree that it makes most sense to have a combination of high level international games and work at the grass roots level.
I think the point of Tom Melville’s article is that the work of USYCA and the like is totally separate from the people organizing these international games.
If a bit more effort was put in to the marketing of the internationals, the grass roots would be more easily grown and the benefits would be multiplied.
Things like:
1. engaging with the media to get more word out to the broader audience,
2. organizing kids clinics with the international players in the days leading up to the games,
3. setting up a junior league in the region to cash in on any new fans…
Was any of this done?
Excellent article Orville. You are right, both methods have to be implemented. The approach with Youth Cricket led by Jaime Harrison is amazing and I hope USYCA continues to flourish. On the expat side… I am sure some form of India vs Pakistan would be an amazing crowd puller !
Usual racist stuff. Why is Newyorkcricket publishing this nonsense ?
MG, please don’t take offense at the imperfect use of the term “Americans” in this discussion. The problem is that we have no noun that means “people who live in the United States with no direct familial connection to cricket.” Since this description fits 95% of Americans, we lazily tend to stereotype this group as just “Americans.” Still, rather than form a committee to invent a more accurate term, I prefer to take a different route and just convert all non-fans into cricket fanatics, thus eventually solving both the cricket problem and the semantic problem.
Well, I don’t know what he means by “Americans”……How does he know that most of these people that came to watch the matches weren’t “Americans”…To me, an American is an American citizen….if Mr. Melvin’s definition of an “American” is white, then I don’t know. There’s a huge South Asian, Caribbean, Australian & English population in the United States..if we can make cricket appealing to at least people that come from cricket-playing descendants, then that itself will be a huge success.