ALDIE, Va. — As I park my car at Hanson Park on a crisp Saturday morning in November, games are already under way. I drive past teams on a bench up against a wall of netting designed to keep the ball from sailing onto the adjacent soccer fields over on Field 2. My sights are set on Field 1, though, where Virginia Tech has just started to chase a target of 97 set by George Washington. Shortly after I arrive, VT captain Syed Talal Hasan is caught out for just four runs, bringing out Jayesh Sam in the third spot. A tall, thin Indian man in Tech colors spots me and walks over to shake my hand.
This is Sunmeet Maheshwari, president of the Virginia Tech Cricket Club, and the reason I found out about the Collegiate Cricket League’s Atlantic Regional in the first place. Welcome to a world unspoiled by cash-driven realignments and exhausting speculation on buyouts and transfers, where nobody gets a neon light-soaked recruit shoots with weird dancing coaches and headlines like “Pitt Wins Backyard Brawl by 79 Runs” and “UT Dallas Beats Texas on Final Ball” are never far away.
This story began like many others do: as another, similar, smaller-scaled story that featured a Zoom call with Sunmeet as the centerpiece. As part of my interview prep, I scrolled the team Instagram account earlier in the day and noticed their schedule for the weekend. Two days later, I’m here with a camera and a vision, aiming to talk to the two teams this story was supposed to be about in the first place: Virginia Tech and West Virginia, two Appalachian schools that have made names for themselves in the primordial days of college cricket.
Both teams have national pedigree: Virginia Tech won the 2018 American College Cricket national title and finished national runner-up twice before that, while West Virginia won the 2019, 2020, and 2022 ACC titles, winning the latter two on consecutive days after the 2020 championship was delayed by COVID-19. Penn State, Stony Brook, Georgetown, George Washington, Rutgers, and Boston University - who drove down at 3am on Friday morning to get here and are one of the few teams with an actual coach - are also competing this weekend.
Cricket is a club sport, meaning it’s driven entirely by current students. There is no affiliation with the NCAA or the athletic department; most Division I departments likely don’t even know they have the sport on campus. Student officers in club sports are their own marketing staff, directors of operations, development officers, and recruiting coordinators. Clubs can be difficult to get moving and sustain because they have much more specific needs than other student organizations: space, equipment, but most of all sustained numbers. Finding 11-15 students to field a cricket team once is not that hard, but staying there is always harder than getting there.
Sunmeet and Virginia Tech have ascribed to the ABCs of college sports: Always Be ‘Crootin. The best bet is to get on new students early in the school year, so university events like Gobblerfest are a big boost.
“We try and have our table closer to the other Southeast Asian clubs,” Sunmeet told me. “That way people coming in who are interested in those other clubs potentially see us and also come on and join us. As far as recruiting them to a competitive team, we just ask them to show up to practices and maybe hold a tryout here or there.” VTCC also hosts a tennis ball cricket tournament at least once a semester as a fundraiser that the club tries to leverage to get other South Asian student groups to field their own teams.
VTCC didn’t have to seek out their current captain, though: he beat them to the punch.
“So I used to play home back in Pakistan for my university,” Syed told me. “I came here for my master’s and came to know there was a cricket club at Virginia Tech. I reached out to the president at the time and he told me they had regular practices and I can show up to a practice. There were I guess 15 or 20 players there when I showed up. I bowled, I batted, and they picked me out for regionals.”
Like VT, West Virginia’s other South Asian student organizations created networking opportunities for cricket on campus. That’s how WVU got its current club president, Huzaifah Farooq, and captain Kumail Abbas.
“We were having this event for our Pakistani student association back at WVU,” Huzaifah recalled. “This one senior guy he walks in, comes into the party and goes, ‘Hey, do you guys play cricket at all?’ I mean, it’s been a couple of years since we played a competitive cricket, and then he was like, ‘well, we practice, why don’t you [and Kumail] join us?’” The rest is history, which West Virginia has plenty of in this sport.
College cricket also offers something very rare in this era of the sport. India and Pakistan are notorious rivals on the pitch and, well, quite a bit more than that off it. The countries’ cricket boards refuse to send their national teams to the other and will only meet on neutral fields in ICC tournaments, and their T20 franchise leagues are played at the same time - meaning international players must choose between them (they usually choose India if it’s an option). The notion of the two groups on the field as teammates can be hard to fathom right now.
In the US, though, things are different. Stripped of its nationalist undercurrent on the other side of the world, cricket is the foundation of a tight-knit community here built around a common love for the game.
“I’ve never played with Indians in my entire life until I came here and met them,” said Kumail. “It’s a sport which connects a lot of people. In the US, especially when a sport is in the minority, it feels good that our sport is alive here and introduced to more people here and we can connect with them.”
“I guess that’s one of the funny things, right?” Syed said. “As a nation, Pakistan and India, that rivalry is intense back home, but once you come here you’re playing with them. It’s a different sense of community that builds up because you’re speaking the same language, you have the same culture even though we’re divided by borders. You’re connected by this one sport that you both as a nation love.”
Huzaifah echoed Sayed’s sentiment, describing these clubs as “an act of service” to their respective university communities.
“I think it’s a whole different sense of community building over here. When you play a common sport that is not very dominant in this part of the world you connect with people and you share those interests. When you know that you are representing something that’s not so common, it’s a whole different feeling.”
College cricket’s niche is not wide, but it runs very deep for the people in it. Many of the people playing the game now thought they had to leave the game behind before suiting up for their university teams. The chance to grab a bat or throw on a helmet again is simply too good to pass up.
“The students we have had, especially on the competitive team, are really passionate for the sport and they love it,” said Sunmeet. “That’s one of the major reasons why they stick around and try to compete. They also want to try and potentially go out for other leagues or attempt to try minor leagues. Even if they go to a full-time job in another state, they can probably find another league where they can play.”
They have good reason for doing that: Saurabh Netravalkar walked a similar path and is college cricket’s greatest success story.
Most people know the story of Netravalkar by this point, which was inevitable after he took the wickets of Babar Azam, Rohit Sharma, and Virat Kohli in the span of less than a week in the 2024 T20 World Cup. Netravalkar came to the US for his master’s degree in 2015 and competed in ACC with Cornell, setting him on a path to eventually captain the United States for two years and later become the best bowler to represent the USA in modern international cricket. Not bad for a guy who works full-time at Oracle.
Netravalkar’s story isn’t just unique because of his talent or the scarcity of professional opportunities in cricket in the United States. It’s also rare because college tournaments have historically been rather small, not all that well-advertised, and scarce. There are no conferences in the way they exist elsewhere in college sports that might offer more games, and teams that play leather ball cricket (as opposed to tape or tennis ball) are a fraction of the overall number of cricket clubs in the US. Netravalkar’s success is very much a “Tony Stark did this in a cave with a bunch of scraps” kind of achievement.
With all of that in mind… I think I’m ready to learn more about why all these teams are here.
It has become clear that Virginia Tech will not be chasing down George Washington’s 96 from earlier in the morning as wickets begin to tumble and solid contact is hard to come by, so I take a moment to get my bearings at Field 1. It has character because the playing surface is decidedly not level all the way around; there is a gulch behind square on one end where fine leg is at best visible from the waist up from where I stand. There is a ring of floodlights and scattered sets of steel bleachers, but what really catches my eye are the two 20ft high tripods for cameras capturing the angles behind the bowler from each end that are essential to cricket on TV. After the match ends - George Washington wins by 12 runs - I meander over to take a closer look at their setup and meet young broadcaster Rahul Karthik, who has been on the play-by-play call all weekend in Aldie.
“There’s a lot of talent on show here,” said Rahul, who is on the call for his second tournament in three weeks after doing the CCL Midwest Regional. “I’ve been seeing a lot of excellent batters, excellent bowlers, [and] some phenomenal all arounders come through and show their skill set.”
Conditions are a fundamental part of cricket, though. How has it played through a handful of games?
“Yesterday, there was a bit of extra bounce and the outfield wasn’t the fastest, so you had to really bat well to get your runs. I think today, because of the rain from overnight, it’s skidding a bit for the spinners. It’s not a pitch where you can just swing through the line, but also not one where you can’t score runs at all. So it’s a good contest between bat and ball.”
I ask Rahul if a tournament organizer is around. He points to a man in a red t-shirt with a silicone rake in his hand, working hard to wring water out of the synthetic pitch so the bowler’s plant foot won’t slip after that overnight rain Rahul mentioned.
“That’s the founder,” he says. “You should talk to him.”
And that’s how I met one of the most important people in college cricket.
Ashrav Paul is one of three founders of the CCL along with fellow Georgetown alums Siddharth Myadam and Steve Smith (important: not that one, though I later learned he gets that a lot). He is an unquestioned doer, hands-on with every aspect of the tournament that he can manage - up to and including suiting up for Georgetown in the inaugural national championship in Austin, Texas, last April. Siddharth - who is not in Aldie this weekend but was in Chicago for the Midwest Regionals - played for Georgetown, too.
“It’s personal to me, it’s personal to Steve and Sid, as well,” Ashrav said. “This is honestly our baby, and these are our kids essentially that are playing on the field, and we want to take as best care as possible of them, and we’ll do anything that we need to make them enjoy the sport and have a good experience at the league.”
“We found that there’s not enough of a structured platform for these guys right now in America. While there are leagues that exist, we wanted to be slightly different and promote the game as well as help these guys create a platform to showcase their skills as well as to give them a pathway to professional cricket.”
There are three college cricket championships that have operated over the last 15 or so years: the CCL, the National College Cricket Association since 2019, and American College Cricket, which has been dormant for two years but is looking to make a return in 2026. The CCL is different from the other two in that it’s a T10 (or “60 Strikes”) format instead of T20, owing to its affiliation with the National Cricket League founded by Arun Agarwal, whom Smith described as “a family friend for about 10 years.” Agarwal introduced Smith to the sport, and he knew in short order he wanted to get involved. He teamed up with his fellow Hoyas to create the CCL as a 501(c)(3) with backing from the NCL.
The philosophy of using T10 in the CCL is simple: every ball is a highlight, and that makes it easier to market to the modern age and fit it alongside other college sports highlights on social media.
“Every college kid is on social media and Gen Alpha, which is really our target, has grown up with an iPad in their hand, so the attention span is zero,” said Smith. “How do we create something that’s truly American that can be adopted by Americans, not just people from the diaspora? With this T10, 60 Strikes format, what you’re gonna end up with is action-packed.”
T10 has its share of skeptics, and the format has had plenty of growing pains that have not spared the NCL, but it has a stronger outlook than its peers in the Wild West of Ten10 cricket. On a fall Saturday in Aldie, though, it’s hard to see T10 as anything other than a success for the clubs that signed up to be here. It lets the CCL give them good value for their entry fees by packing a ton of games into a weekend: 31 games are scheduled over three days at three fields here, including two semifinals, a final, and a third-place game which teams have to qualify for. Teams and players become familiar as they get more comfortable in the space and storylines emerge organically across three days of competition.
Anyone who has ever worked an NCAA baseball or softball regional knows exactly what that’s like, except this isn’t an NCAA event with its accompanying bells and whistles: two of the three owners are here handling logistics with a handful of Ashrav’s close friends volunteering to help over the weekend.
That doesn’t mean it’s unstructured, though. Regionals have a very clear path to nationals, and if teams don’t qualify, they don’t advance. The CCL is also very strict on eligibility; while the ACC has allowed limited numbers of alumni to compete, the CCL requires teams to field only currently-enrolled students. They can be master’s or doctoral students, but they have to be studying at the university they represent.
Club sports also offer unique opportunities that might be considered less desirable or entirely unwelcome under NCAA governance: the CCL rather notably offers a $10,000 prize to the team that wins its national championship to entice teams to commit. It did create more work for the founding trio: they had to convince club presidents the whole setup wasn’t too good to be true.
“Last year was tough,” said Smith. “I mean we reached out to about 50 colleges and ended up having about 15, and then a few dropped right before the tournament. We ended up with 12, and we’re going to stick with that. I think that’s a great number and kind of honors our [history], you know?”
Like the clubs’ own on-campus efforts, Ashrav said word of mouth was crucial to help the championship grow.
“We found a way to convince them to play in our league and it honestly grew from there. They came [to Austin] and saw what we did,” he said. “They found us to be very professional in the way that league was run the, way it was organized.”
“The 12 teams over there [in year one], they were honestly our voices. They helped us recruit more teams. We had regional calls with every single college that we spoke to. We spoke to over 70 colleges in this past year, of which about 55 were interested in playing, and then finally, we had about 30-35 sign up for the regionals across the country.”
The CCL has put a ton of effort into presentation and staking out a lane in the sport with a player-forward experience. The uniforms they provide to teams are sharp, with pops of color on white fields that include helmet and leg pad covers to complete the look. The league’s social media presence is sleek, especially on Instagram, where they do all the things college athletes and fans love (they even got Sunmeet to explain the basics of fast bowling). Highlights have seven-figure view counts across Facebook and Instagram, and the CCL’s IG page has over 21,000 followers, which dwarfs its peers in the space and is more than a lot of FCS football teams. Smith touted the reach of their social channels multiple times during our conversation, though noted that most of that reach is to the subcontinent instead of a domestic audience.
That’s not what the CCL is aiming for long-term, but it may not necessarily be a bad thing: India sends more international students to American universities than any other country, surpassing China in 2022 and joined in the top 10 by Bangladesh and Nepal. As university presidents look for ways to hedge against the dreaded Enrollment Cliff, Smith and Ashrav both hope schools will add cricket to their toolbox to recruit students both from the diaspora and from the subcontinent proper.
“I hope that universities start recognizing the potential for exposure for their schools,” Smith said. “There’s universities like [UT Dallas] that have gone all in on Cricket, partnering with the National Cricket League for a stadium on their campus doing a lot of promotion for the Comet Cricket club. I think limitations are the university logo, the varsity status, the scholarships, so universities haven’t adopted the sport yet even though it’s the second most popular sport on the planet.”
To Smith’s point, most universities are very strict on what kind of marks and naming can be used in club sports, being careful not to muddy the waters on what is and is not a varsity sport under the administration of the athletic department. That’s not entirely unreasonable, but it means these teams sometimes have to get creative with their branding. That’s a labyrinth deeper and more convoluted than even the politics of American cricket, but Ashrav believes the imprimatur of large universities with established brands in athletics could help the sport grow - and recruit a long sought-after demographic to try the sport for the first time.
“There are a lot of these baseball players that may not essentially play baseball at an international level or national level,” he said, “and there’s an opportunity for them to convert into cricket and start playing this game and fall in love with this game and hopefully go as well as a cricketer. We are looking at scholarships as a potential route to get more cricketers and students to play this game and we’re trying to work with universities now and later to sort of find a way to build enough infrastructure for cricket.”
The CCL has big dreams - “visions of grandeur” as Smith describes them - but, as Ashrav suggested, they’re keenly aware that what they want requires a long-term commitment. Universities are hard to impress or even get an audience with depending on what’s asked of them when it comes to sports. Varsity cricket will require a long, sustained lobbying campaign, probably some sizable third-party donations, and will likely need to start with women’s cricket because of the way athletic departments generally navigate Title IX, unless they’re 80% male like VMI or The Citadel. In this football and basketball-obsessed era of college athletics, taking on a new sport - even one that could open a lot of doors to new students, donors, and sponsors - is a tough sell. Sustained club sports with good alumni support are not the worst thing that could happen for college cricket, though. While it does potentially expose them to the Westerosi politics of the modern American game, it also lets them structure competitions in a way that is authentic to the sport and suited to the people who play it.
In the meantime, the CCL’s player-focused approach has made fans out of the teams competing in Aldie. Syed and Kumail both speak highly of the uniforms, and Huzaifah loves what any club president loves: organization and communication.
“I sent out a text on the group chat a couple of days ago and Ashrav didn’t even take a second before giving me a call back directly,” he said. “The accessibility to the organizers gives a lot of confidence to me and the team reps . . . that the organizers are putting an effort into this into this event, the organizers are actually caring about what’s going into this event and what’s coming out of this event.”
Okay, enough business. Let’s talk ball. Who are the best teams here?
Smith and Ashrav give diplomatic answers centered on the overall level of play, as they should, but Rahul is a fellow play-by-play guy. I know my brethren will shoot me straight.
“This weekend, I’ve really liked watching Rutgers play,” he says. “Pittsburgh, equally magnificent. They’re unbeaten across, I think 3 games, they’ve been magnificent with the bat and the ball, and Boston University was brilliant with the ball. George Washington has been phenomenal as well with the bat. This is not an easy pitch to bat on, but these teams have made it look relatively easy.”
Rahul knows his stuff: the day after we spoke, Pitt held off Rutgers to win the regional title, with both teams plus George Washington qualifying for the CCL National Championship in March and joining Ohio State, Michigan, and Wisconsin there. Two more regionals are scheduled to bring in three teams each. West Virginia and Virginia Tech both missed out, but they still have opportunities to compete in the spring in other tournaments - events the CCL encourages teams to play in because of the difference in formats.
Pitt’s club has the star of the CCL season so far in sophomore Omkar Zope. The big right-hander from Chesco scored 497 runs in eight games, including the first century in CCL history with 111* against West Virginia. Zope is a known entity in domestic cricket, knocking two half-centuries for The Philadelphians in his third season of Minor League Cricket back in September. He’s also everything the CCL wants: tall with a fluid and powerful swing and probably the only player on the field with a Perfect Game profile page. They know it, too - they mic’ed him up for Pitt’s pool play game against Rutgers, where he scored a casual 59 off 26. It’s the exact kind of content that raises an athlete’s profile and it is always a hit.
Zope was the first player to wear a mic during CCL competition, but if the league has its way, he won’t be a one-off. He’ll be a trailblazer for a new era of cricket that finally gives it the American roots it has wanted for years.
Thank you so much for reading this edition of Stumps & Stripes. While I could rant and rave about administrative drama all I want, it gets tiresome, and this is the kind of story I wanted to write when I started this project. Doing this was the fulfillment of a vision, and I learned something in the process: I actually really loved doing it, and I want to do more of it. There are, within this story, ideas for at least three other stories about college cricket I hope to write sometime in the next few months.
If you’re here for the first time: welcome, and thanks for reading to the end! If you want to know more about this beautiful, chaotic niche that doesn’t have to do with its Westeros-style politics, I encourage you to take a look at what’s happening in Minor League Cricket and the benefit it has on the US domestic game.
If you enjoyed reading this piece today, the best thing you can do for me is what the Florida Gators did for the CCL: word of mouth. Share the story and get other people to subscribe. My readers are my reach, and every time someone sends an article to someone else, the chance of it growing goes up dramatically.
I’ll have more to write about once I survive crossover season. Stay tuned!