Should Minor League Cricket Be Longer?

We’re two weeks away from the start of what I, and many others, would argue is the best part of the U.S. domestic cricket calendar, and the part of it that is most geared toward Americans. Its name is deeply misleading, because it’s the closest thing the United States has to a domestic national championship.

Minor League Cricket is scheduled to begin on August 7th, with 26 teams across four divisions playing a 10-game schedule before an expanded 12-team playoff stage and a Grand Final, which the Atlanta Fire won last year, although only the people at the ground know what happened in the final over; the stream failed, and when it came back, they were rushing onto the field to celebrate what ultimately proved to be the last great cricketing achievement for Aaron Jones before we found out he had thrown his cricketing career away before it ever started.

Is that messy? Of course it is, but that’s the point! Those jagged-edged stories are the sorts of things that give American cricket its lore. Its character. The things that define being a fan in what are hopefully the early days of the Fourth Age of American cricket. We need the mess, and we need people to document the mess, which is part of why I started Stumps & Stripes in the first place. If Major League Cricket is the show pony, Minor League Cricket is the draft horse. It’s arguably the reason Shadley van Schalkwyk and Mohammad Mohsin got picked for the 2026 T20 World Cup, and it shows just how many young players there are waiting for a chance to take a step up in weight class. The competition level is pretty good, too; in addition to virtually all of the USA men’s national team pool, MiLC features Shakib Al Hasan and Tagenarine Chanderpaul, the latter of whom was facing Ritvik Appidi in Morrisville only a few weeks before opening the batting for the West Indies at Eden Gardens. It sits at the nexus point of elite professionals, up-and-comers, and who-is-that-guys where cricket produces its most entertaining stories. It is arguably the most important cricket competition for American players.

It’s also too short. Way too short.

That is perhaps an inconvenient truth. Minor League Cricket is not particularly lucrative, although the New England Eagles reportedly sold for about $500,000 over the winter to a consortium based out of Seattle largely in spite of that. Teams rarely if ever charge admission for games, and their presence in both traditional and social media is usually quite sparse. By the time any potential new viewers realize the league is in season, it’s already over. That’s an issue facing Major League Cricket, as well, but unlike MLC, MiLC has the opportunity to fix that by taking something from what is ostensibly its kin in the world of baseball.

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Taste the Fresh Difference

Anyone familiar with full-season Minor League Baseball leagues and teams immediately understands the concept of a split season. MiLB leagues all the way up and down the ladder split their seasons down the middle from April to mid-June and mid-June to August, with playoffs in early September. The playoffs are four-team affairs, where the first half and second half winners of each division (or the two best teams if one wins both halves) square off to send one team each to the championship series. It can seem a bit odd, but in a league where rosters are likely to change drastically over the course of five months, it’s an attempt to account for the transience that can occur. A team that is dominant in the first half may lose its top two prospects to Triple A or a trade after Father’s day, but that first-half record will matter; conversely, a team that’s affiliated with a trade deadline seller isn’t sunk if they get another organization’s #2 or #3 prospect in a deal - that guy can come in and get them to the playoffs. Every stage of the year has its own stakes, but the important thing is that a full season with the Durham Bulls is really two shorter seasons buttressed right up against each other.

You can see where I’m going with this.

There is a gaping hole in the U.S. domestic cricket calendar in the spring. Local leagues begin in April and even March in some parts of the country, but the national season is one week in April for the Houston Open at Prairie View and then quiet until MLC kicks off in mid-June. That’s a critical time for players to build up to the peak of the summer in MLC that’s going to waste for all except the 15 guys who play in ODIs - and the ICC has already said in so many words that those games are worthless. There’s no cricket to engage with, to talk about, to build hype for the tentpole event of the summer by watching the guys teams picked up at the draft in March and seeing what they could contribute to one of the six (or eight) franchises where they get a List A caliber opportunity.

The future growth of the domestic game makes this necessary. In Smit Patel’s profile of Matthew Tromp during the MLC season, he attributes Tromp’s breakthrough 2026 campaign to a stint playing club cricket in New Zealand over the preceding winter. He was in a competitive environment every day for six months, not just with sustained playing opportunities but sustained coaching that built a launchpad for his development. That’s something that simply is not available to American players inside the United States, and it’s a critical piece missing from the development pipeline.

It’s great that Tromp was able to work around that, but he had the family resources to make it happen and also got an assist from one of New Zealand’s most successful test captains to get in the door. Not every American player has that; in fact, most American players don’t. An expanded national domestic season will eventually be necessary, and Minor League Cricket is not only a valid vehicle for that, it’s probably the best one, given MLC’s desire to keep its main competition confined to a month early on in the summer so as to sit between the PSL/IPL and The Hundred.

There is precedent for this. The Big Bash League sits in the middle of the Australian domestic season, with first class and List A competition either side of it and the international calendar layered on top of it; Cricket Australia made a big deal of having test matches during the day and the BBL at night in the hopes they would complement each other. Cricketers are in a high-performance environment for four months before the IPL, including the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy that starts in late November. Plenty of IPL regulars play in that tournament, and international players may dip out to represent India as required. Extending Minor League Cricket’s season into the spring, with a two-month window in the middle for MLC, ensures American players show up to training camp in better form, match-fit, and with a fresh body of work to build on. Then, after the MLC season is over, they go put in another 10 games plus playoffs to make a case for MLC rosters the following year.

Even if MiLC teams played a 10-game schedule in late April through late May, a 10-game schedule in August and had playoffs in the first half of September, we’re still only talking about four and a half months, but that adds runtime to the national season and would increase the games for domestic players by somewhere between 30% and 50%, depending on how much they play in MLC. A functioning USA Cricket sometime in the future could add a perfunctory one-day competition to check a Full Member box at the beginning of April or in late September to link to the Atlanta Open, and then it’s a five-month national domestic calendar. MiLC could even run an “all-star tournament” with the best 15 players from each division for a week and a half. However it gets carved up, that’s a full-fledged conventional season affording time to meaningfully engage with the game.

That would, of course, cost money. That’s money that Minor League Cricket does not generate, and while costs might not double, they would likely increase sharply between player pay and operations. For the sake of argument, let’s say the average MiLC team loses $40,000 a season. How many owners could afford to lose $70,000 instead? Could they find ways to trim it to $60,000? Are there creative logistical things the league could do to reduce those costs further? Could a longer season open the door for more sponsorship interest to offset those losses? That would require at least a couple of staffers who could pound pavement or tap business relationships to muster support - which is, in fairness, part of the point of the exercise.

Minor League Cricket is important for players, but it’s not just for players. It’s also where the US develops coaches, umpires, and commentators that flesh the game out and take it with them outside the rope. We cannot continue to airdrop people from established cricketing backgrounds into the United States and act like the game is growing - they’re welcome, of course, but at some point the American game has to be able to develop its own people who are better positioned to adapt cricket to the expectations intrinsic to America’s very different sports culture. Baseball never runs out of staffers because of the abundance of opportunities not just as players, but as field staff and front office staff to build a body of work within the business. The same is true in hockey with its robust minor league system, and it’s true in football and basketball with the massive college sports apparatus that operates in all 50 states. The major leagues never run out of off-field talent because there are always literally thousands of people with experience working around their sports at a smaller scale, and the transition up is usually smooth. Those opportunities do not exist in cricket, or if they do, they are closed off to people outside the sport looking to get a foot in the door. Minor League Cricket can go a long way toward bringing those barriers down.

This has been part of MiLC’s stated mission all along. Johnny Grave called it “the engine driving American cricket forward,” but the current structure of the league is the equivalent of revving that engine in the driveway for 10 seconds and then letting it idle for half an hour. We know the engine works, but we’re just burning gas. There aren’t really any other vehicles to get cricket down the road, either, but accelerating MiLC and being proactive in growing the sport is necessary and can make major gains with comparatively little strain. Expanding the season, rather than simply flipping it to a different part of the calendar, is the way the league can drive the game forward most effectively by giving Americans more opportunities to engage.

If that’s not the goal, why are we here? I’d rather be doing this, but I could be spending my time acting my age by working on my nephew’s car or losing golf balls or collecting obscure small batch whisky. It’s time for ACE to take the wheel.