An MLC Women's League Presents a Huge Opportunity - and a Huge Challenge

When Aaman Patel interviewed US women’s national team captain Anika Kolan on opening night of the 2025 MLC season in Oakland, I thought it was a neat moment that felt organic. She’s from the Central Coast, so it makes sense she would make the trek to take in the first game, and Aaman knows enough about the national team setups that he would recognize her in a crowd. She didn’t look like she was planning for PR work; she was in a jacket in the stands watching the game. I was happy to see an important figure for a team that has lived in the shadows for most of its existence get some attention during the game’s big annual US showcase event.

Then the other interviews started. And they kept going. US women’s national team players showed up at all three stadiums, so I put two and two together well before MLC CEO Johnny Grave put the league’s ambitions for expanding the women’s game on the record. Before the final game of the regular season, he was clear that a women’s professional T20 league is in the works:

I know this has been kicked around for over a year, but I cannot tell you how absolutely stoked I was to hear Grave say that out loud. There are 24 franchise T20 teams for women in the entire world. Not leagues - TEAMS! If the US started even a four team league, that’s a 17% increase in the number of franchise opportunities for women, and 14% of all women’s franchise cricket in the world would be played in the United States if they play a double round robin. There isn’t a ton of women’s cricket worldwide during the US summer, be it franchise or international, which means the teams could swing for the fences on talent. Imagine Laura Wolvaardt in Seattle green. Hayley Matthews in San Francisco orange. Alyssa Healy. Alana King. Amelia Kerr. Lauren Filer could come over here and potentially be the first woman to bowl 80 mph in a game. As long as they’re all free for the start of The Hundred, there are a ton of stars available. (I’m not getting my hopes up for Indian players, but I would never say no to more Smriti Mandhana.)

This could be a star-studded powerhouse of a league that could attract a whole new audience and investor base to the sport by dropping cricket into the height of the women’s sports boom.

It’s an exciting time for women’s sports as a spectator event in North America, and growth is still accelerating. The WNBA is now a big enough property that it could reasonably take over Sunday Night Baseball’s time slot on ESPN with little to no initial dropoff; marquee NWSL games draw bigger audiences on broadcast TV than MLS games, and the two year old Professional Women’s Hockey League has been a huge hit at the gate, with attendance numbers soaring 27% in its second season to over 7,500 a game, selling out mid-sized arenas in Boston, Montreal, and Toronto, and pulling good crowds into the NHL arena in St. Paul. That says nothing of women’s college sports, where basketball, volleyball, and softball are all enjoying considerable growth to the point that NCAA Division I women’s basketball and volleyball are preparing to pay out “tournament units” like the billion-dollar men’s basketball tournament does. Softball’s Women’s College World Series is always an excellent TV draw and usually does well at the gate in OKC - especially when the hometown Sooners are playing.

Let those good vibes wash over you. This is exciting! Something revolutionary in cricket that a US audience is predisposed to engage with? Sounds awesome!

Now the hard part: where do the domestic players come from?

For the sake of argument, let’s say this new league’s roster rules are consistent with MLC’s current roster rules and that all six teams field a women’s side. The roster range is 16-19 players apiece, with a maximum of eight internationals. That’s 48 internationals alongside a minimum of 48 domestic players and a maximum of 66.

That minimum number is more players than the United States has capped in WT20Is since gaining that status seven years ago - several of whom have since retired. The maximum number is more than 12% of the entire domestic player pool, which USAC had at 530 in February. This will be a heavy lift for domestic women’s cricket given the state it is in, and domestic players could look overwhelmed at first against high-level internationals.

It is not fair to simply say the national team is bad. They’re extremely young. “Extremely young” doesn’t even really do it justice. On their tour of the Netherlands in early June, they were captained by Aditi Chudasama who turned 19 just before the tour started; she was filling in for Kolan, who turns 19 later this month. Two players who went on that tour are old enough to buy their own alcohol in the US, and four players are, as of this writing, still too young to vote. That touring side didn’t include Tara Norris (27, the oldest player in the setup) nor Ella Claridge (22), both of whom are set to suit up in The Women’s Hundred in England later this summer where Norris has been a regular for several years and Claridge is yet to debut. It may not shock you to learn that the tourists got swept 4-0 by a much older Netherlands side with three losses of 50+ runs. They were bowled out twice, didn’t hit a six, and cracked 100 as a team once.

Investment in women’s cricket worldwide has kicked into overdrive in the last few years, especially in the Big Three, but it has been neglected for an eternity in the US. The USACA [spits] failed to put on any women’s domestic cricket events from 2011 to 2016 when they got suspended for good, and there is no record of the United States fielding a team in an international event between 2012 and 2016; there were fewer than 100 women’s players in the US at the time the ICC gave USACA [spits] the boot. USA Cricket began the rebuilding job when it took the reins in 2019, but when effectively gifted WODI status in 2022 - considered the premier form of the women’s game given the rarity of women’s tests - no one was ready to capitalize. The USA didn’t play a WODI until the spring of 2024 and lost that status earlier this year, going 3-6 and ending their time in the elite tier of women’s cricket on an ugly 128 run loss to Zimbabwe at Grand Prairie.

The signs of healing from what is essentially two lost generations of women’s cricket are just starting to emerge; most of the premier players in the talent pool are under 25, many of them are still teenagers, and professional opportunities for American women are rare at best. The U19 women’s championships was held earlier this summer in Glenville, New York, about 25 miles northwest of Albany, and the player pool doubled in size this year to 48… which is 9% of all registered women’s players in the United States, including multiple players from that Netherlands tour. The Intra-Zonal tournaments are light on team numbers, with only two squads in the South Atlantic zone in 2025 which played each other 10 times: the same team won all 10 games. A player whose stats indicate she played U11 cricket the year before was the leading wicket-taker in those games.

Like I said, a heavy lift.

At the same time, that’s exactly why this is so important. Professionalizing the game is a critical part of the growth of women’s cricket, and MLC can be a leader on that. It has to balance that leadership with the quality and commercial appeal of the product, which will be no small feat. But I remain bullish on the potential of a hypothetical WMLC, and such a project has less competition straining the talent pool worldwide, meaning it could establish itself early as a major player in the women’s game, and launching ahead of the 2028 Olympics is perfect timing.

So now we wait. Someone told me one time that’s the hardest part.

Thanks for reading Stumps & Stripes! I gave myself a reprieve from domestic boardroom drama to write about something that makes me hopeful for the sport’s future here. If you would like something… less optimistic, check out my piece on USA Cricket’s alleged breaches of the ACE contract, the Ted Stevens Act, and whether all this drama affects the organization’s viability.

Next week, I have thoughts on a way MLC can be an innovator in the way we talk about and analyze cricket, plus one 2026 need for each team to help keep the off-season discourse going while we wait for Minor League Cricket later this month (apparently?) and national team action in October. Stay tuned!