A few teens waited tensely in the outfield as a scrawny boy whacked the ball and then dashed off, holding his bat. As the outfielders scrambled for the ball, the boy raced back to home base, then away from it and back again. He continued this routine twice more.
If this sounds like a baseball player gone mad, it’s not. It’s a game called cricket and it’s becoming more and more popular in the Bay Area – in part because of the recent surge of South Asian immigrants.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, 143,000 Indo-Americans live in the Bay Area today – three times more than a decade ago, before many South Asians immigrated to meet Silicon Valley’s demand for technology workers in the late 1990s.
Since then, the popularity of cricket has been on the rise. It is one of the most popular games in countries such as India, England, Australia and Pakistan. It has also been played for centuries in the United States.
“Cricket is one of the genuinely unknown aspects of American sports history,” said Tom Melville, the author of “Cricket for Americans: Playing and Understanding the Game” and “The Tented Field: A History of Cricket in America.” “People don’t know that George Washington played cricket with his soldiers at Valley Forge.”
Aroon Vijaykar picked up his first cricket bat at age 5, when he moved from Fremont to Bangalore, India. He quickly fell in love with the sport. When he returned to the United States five years later, he was disappointed that so few people played cricket.
“If it was such a famous sport in the rest of the world, I figured that the U.S. would have some kind of major league for cricket,” he said.
Vijaykar, 16, and his older brother, Nikhil, decided to do something about it. When Nikhil was at Saratoga High School three years ago, the brothers formed a cricket club at the school.
The club started with less than 10 members and has grown to about 20, including a few girls and students who are not of South Asian descent. Aroon is the team captain.
In recent years, students have created cricket teams at Homestead, Monta Vista, Bellarmine and Irvington high schools.
The California Cricket Academy, a non-profit organization formed in 2003 to organize cricket games for youth, started out with 22 players. Participants practice twice a week and play games every weekend, including occasional tournaments as far away as Chicago and Toronto.
Kinjal and Hemant Buch, the academy’s founders, said they helped form the group because their 7-year-old son said he wanted to learn how to play cricket.
“That summer we thought that we would gather a few kids and have them play,” said Buch, 40, a resident of Cupertino.
The Buchs got more than they expected. They ended up hiring professional coaches and this summer, the academy has 60 players, ages 9 to 15.
Most of the academy’s players are of South Asian descent, but the Buch family has been distributing handouts at schools in the area to try to get others involved.
Cricket enthusiasts have a vision that the game will someday become part of the mainstream American sports scene, much like soccer did a few decades ago, Melville said.
“Potentially, I suppose cricket could be the next soccer,” Melville said. “Ten, 15, or 20 years from now, maybe we’ll have cricket moms running around.”