Next generation of U.S cricketers honing craft in the Bay Area: ‘They are the future’

SANTA CLARA – One after another, the teenagers at the field off Woodhams Road in Santa Clara made their dramatic approach before bowling a ball into one of two batting cages on a balmy Tuesday afternoon.

Watching with careful eyes was former world-class cricketer Bimal Jadeja, the left-hander who played professionally in both England and his native India.

When one of the boys at the California Cricket Academy failed to follow the fundamentals that helped Jadeja play the game at the highest level for over two decades, the 60-year-old did not hesitate to correct them. 

“He’s so quick to point out if we mess something up with our technique, like if we don’t move our foot to the ball properly,” 13-year-old Vihaan Apte told the Bay Area News Group. 

The kids, who were just a few of the hundreds of players affiliated with one of the top cricket programs in the country, will attend this week’s Major League Cricket matches at the Oakland Coliseum. The local San Francisco Unicorns open the season Thursday night against the defending league champion Washington Freedom, then play twice more over the weekend as the league hosts a total of nine matches over seven days in the Bay Area.

They play one of the fastest-growing sports in the United States, boasting 200,000 active players in the country as of 2024, according to CBS. 

While Jadeja hopes the boys have fun at the A’s old stomping grounds, he also wants his players to learn a thing or two from the world-class cricketers who his students may one day face on the international stage.

“They are the future for the USA,” the coach said while watching 15-year-old Rishi Mekala, a Cupertino High student who dreams of playing for America’s national team.

It is a squad that briefly entered the country’s broader consciousness when it upset international contender Pakistan in the T20 World Cup last summer. 

Youngsters Mekala and Apte both watched the match, one that raised cricket’s visibility in the U.S. and helped recruitment for both CCA and other associations around the Bay Area. 

But for San Ramon Cricket Association president Ramesh Immadi, that watershed moment was just one step of an ongoing process to grow the game in a country where baseball and softball rule as bat-and-ball sports. 

Immadi, who was quick to point out that four players on the senior U.S. women’s team hail from the Tri-Valley area, said that furthering accessibility to playing surfaces and gear will give cricket long-term viability.

“Those are the kind of grassroots-level impacts that are going to generate a lot of interest and contribute to the exponential growth of cricket,” Immadi said, touting how San Ramon has built up its cricket infrastructure and recently announced a partnership with the minor league team Golden State Grizzlies.

CCA president Hemant Buch agreed, having invested thousands of dollars into turning the field at Woodhams Road into a premier cricket facility in the Bay Area.

He modeled the field after those in England, a country CCA athletes have visited in years past. 

Playing at world-class facilities presents a totally different experience compared to the makeshift pitches Americans often must endure. 

“England is such a country where you can have such a good experience, because it’s a beautiful turf wicket, and a grassy track,” Jadeja said.

The NCL standouts who visit the Coliseum over the next two weeks will enjoy British-caliber wickets and tracks at the East Bay monolith.

Among those is Nicholas Pooran, a prolific left-handed batsman from the West Indies who currently stars for Major League Cricket’s MI New York and is one of Mekala’s favorite players.

The CCA kids hope to pick up a thing or two from the superstars they have long watched on television. 

“You can see how fast the ball is going when you’re there live, and on TV you can’t really experience that,” Apte said. “You can see how hard these people are hitting the ball, you can hear the sound of the bat, you can hear everything.”

A dozen miles north in Fremont, Ajay Sampathkumar, 35, took practice swings in the batting cages at Northgate Park.

The prolific batter with the local Indus Cricket Club was training for an upcoming amateur match with his adult teammates, but both he and fellow Northern California Cricket Association member Vijay Chukka noted the dozens of children also practicing their skills in both the cricket cages and the nearby baseball fields.

Sampathkumar credited the popularization of the T20 format, a version of the sport that takes less than four hours to complete a match instead of the traditional three-to-five days, for making the game more exciting for young players. 

Some games are even shorter and thus promote bursts of action.

“Traditionally, cricket was more about batsmen not getting out, but now it’s become more fearless, with the (high-scoring) five-balls and 10-balls that you play, and what kind of impact you can have on the game,” Sampathkumar said.

That faster, more action-packed T20 game was the version Apte and his teammates watched when the USA upset Pakistan.

The breakout star of that match was bowler Saurabh Netravalkar, the India-born developer at Redwood Shores’ Oracle who Buch said has trained with the CAA in years past. Netravalkar plays in MLC for Washington and is someone young cricketers around the Bay Area can model their games after.

And perhaps, eventually, play alongside while representing the nation at the highest level. 

“I would love to play for the U.S.,” Apte said.