The USA Cricket U19 National East Conference Championship games were played at the NY Ovals Cricket Facility in Schenectady through Labor Day Weekend, starring eight regional teams spanning from New York to Georgia.
The NY Ovals is a broad, natural turf area with space for several matches, but Ashok Adikoppula, a co-owner of the grounds and a coach with USA Cricket, the sport’s national governing body, said they plan to have a 1,200-seat spectator area and dugouts for teams by October. He thinks there’s still plenty of work to be done in advocating for the sport.
“We need a lot of local participation, which we don’t see yet. There have been a few folks here and there stopping by, just curious about finding out what’s going on here,” he said. “I think the seating will bring in a lot of spectators in future.”
Adikoppula began playing youth cricket in India, and played for three summers in the Sussex Premier League in England, where he moved to continue his education. Moving to the U.S. in the late 2000s where he continued his career in New Jersey, he struggled finding somewhere to play due to the lack of infrastructure for the sport.
“You’re playing, but you don’t really get the feel of playing the real game because there are not enough facilities,” he said. “This is just made up in some public parks with small fields, and not even cricket field size.”
After a couple years he moved to the Capital Region, where he played for the Tri-City Cricket Club in Schenectady, a team which competes in the New York City-based Commonwealth Cricket League.
“We used to travel [on the] weekend, like six-hour round-trips, and sometimes the games get washed out after going there, or they called off for whatever the reason,” he said. “It was pretty disappointing.”
Adikoppula’s experience motivated him to co-found the Capital District Cricket Association in 2015, which he says has more than 20 teams which compete at parks from Ballston Spa to Coxsackie. So far, the creation of NY Ovals is the culmination of his advocacy efforts.
“It took three and a half years to get this far, to establish these facilities and to bring these teams from all over the country to here. July 4, we had 16 teams here, teams from [the] Bay Area came, teams from Chicago and North Carolina,” he said. “I’m confident in the [following] years, this is going to be the destination.”
There’s record of cricket being played in the U.S. as early as the 18th century, and the bat-and-ball game got popular enough for the first international cricket match to be played in present day Staten Island in 1844 between the Manhattan-based St. George’s Cricket Club and the Canadian national team. However, it was soon overtaken in popularity by baseball in the 1850s and 1860s.
As of 2021, USA Cricket estimated there to be over 200,000 cricket players across more than 400 teams. It’s experienced a new wave of exposure in 2024, following the US team’s June 7 upset of Pakistan in the ICC T20 Cricket World Cup in Dallas, one of three cities in the country where 12 of the World Cup’s 55 matches took place. Adikoppula thinks this exposure is just part of what’s to come in terms of the sport’s notoriety here.
“Having those type of quality internationals coming and playing on your home soil, it just lifts the entire spirit,” he said. “We are confident with [the] 2028 LA Olympics, cricket being included in the LA Olympics, I’m sure it’s going to be even more than what we have seen with this World Cup.”
Camilus Alexander, a coach for the East Conference’s Georgia team, was a member of the U.S. national squad in 2018. The 43-year-old is glad to have seen interest in the sport at multiple levels.
“We have a lot of youngsters coming through,” he said. “The senior team is doing well at the moment, and we want to carry that momentum, you know, in all the different age groups.”
Aaryan Boddupalli, a 16-year-old player for the Washington D.C.-area team, thinks that competitions such as this past weekend’s are a strong sign for cricket’s trajectory.
“We don’t really get to play a national-level tournament like this often, so to play this on good fields like that, it’s great,” he said. “I think it just shows how much the game has grown in the States.”
He thinks the duration of matches is one of multiple reasons why it hasn’t been fully embraced yet.
“You can be here for like, 10 hours,” he said. “That takes up your whole day. And yeah, I guess people at school don’t know what cricket is, so they kind of just think it’s weird.”
Currently the sport is predominantly played by athletes of Southeast Asian descent, with it being most popular in Indian subcontinental, Australasian and Caribbean countries. Boddupalli’s teammate Ayush Patel thinks that varied exposure is the way to get new kinds of people playing it.
“I think the best way is to just introduce it to more states where there’s more ethnic groups and diversity, which will show others how much the sport is actually fun,” he said. “I think we just got to introduce it more to schools, and we got to have charity events and stuff like that.”
Adikoppula has been doing his part to introduce cricket on the school level, having taught it to physical education teachers spanning from Shenendehowa in Clifton Park all the way down to Chatham. He hopes to promote the sport through NY Ovals by developing partnerships with local businesses, and thinks the Capital Region can be a model for the resurgence of one of the country’s oldest sports as infrastructure grows.
“My feeling is, in the 5-10 years down the line, we’ll see a lot of local lads coming into the game and see the All-American sport, it’s going to be in future,” he said. “I’m confident that it’s going to be an easy connect for those folks who are playing any other bat-and-ball game.”
