Deb K Das reports on the USA Under-15 Championship’s in California

Deb K Das03-Jul-2006As only the second USA Under-15 Championship ever to be held in the USA, the tournament presented the California Cricket Academy with its first major opportunity to show how it would execute the controversial three-year contract it had signed with the USA Cricket Association (USACA) to conduct junior cricket in the USA. The results could be best described as mixed–the tournament attracted a great deal of local interest in the San Francisco area, but there were no detailed rosters, scorecards or match results to show what had happened and why.The previous Under-15 tournament had been played several years ago in New Jersey, with Clive Lloyd presiding over the tournament and the Cricket Academy of New Jersey (CANJ) hosting the three-day event. It had been co-sponsored by Major League Cricket (MLC) and US Junior Cricket Inc (USJC), and the costs had been shared by the three organizations.  There was no funding from USACA or any other external source.The success of that tournament could be measured by the fact that two international events– the California Cup played between a British Columbia team and a USA national squad, and the first Americas U-15 tournament, held in Florida– were inaugurated that year.  Unfortunately, cricket politics intervened as it usually does in North American cricket. The Canadian Cricket Association (CCA) and the USACA both decided that these “unofficial” tournaments would have to stop. They took over the Americas U-15 tournament and made a near-disaster of it. The Canada-USA series was not played again.And until this year, all attempts to revive a US national U-15 tournament had failed at the starting gate with disputes over jurisdiction, credit and responsibilities.The contract between USACA and the California Cricket Academy has been criticized for several reasons.  First, many of the other cricket academies and junior cricket organizations (seven or eight in all, according to the last count) were unhappy because they had not been given a chance to compete for the national contract, and viewed USACA’s “sole source contract as arbitrary. Second, there were complaints that many USACA Regional Directors had not even bothered to let their junior cricketers know that a national tournament was in the offing, let alone set up any procedure to select their regional teams. And finally, no details of the tournament facilities and arrangements were posted on the USACA or Calcricket sites until the eleventh hour, when most of those who were interested in the tournament had already made their holiday plans.To its credit, the California Cricket Academy has achieved considerable success in popularizing junior cricket in its area, and has drawn a lot of local interest for its efforts.As a San Jose newspaper put it, A total of 200 cricket players, ages 6 to 15, from as far away as New York, Florida and Kansas, were to descend on cricket fields, called “pitches”, throughout the South Bay. They were to play 26 four-hour games at sites in San Jose, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Cupertino and Stanford over four days. The Academy had hoped to attract 500 spectators to the games and have targeted city leaders and residents with their marketing.  It wanted to push cricket into the mainstream, and hoped that cricket pitches would soon find permanent homes alongside soccer and baseball fields in the Bay Area.The game has a small but growing local following with about 20 cricket pitches scattered throughout the area. The California Cricket Academy had 22 children three years ago, and has about 70 active players today.In the Bay Area, the game is heavily dominated by players from India and Pakistan, as many of those immigrants have chosen Silicon Valley as their new home.The cricket tournament cost about $60,000 to put on, which included renting hotel rooms for the away teams and waiving entrance fees. All the money was donated by local companies and individuals.