On a wet Saturday in Blacksburg, Virginia, the first ball in the history of cricket at East Tennessee State University should have been a wicket.
Joseph, a right arm medium-fast allrounder from Zimbabwe, bowled a tricky ball back of a length that turned into a lazy fly ball to Cody, a converted baseball player, fielding at midwicket, but he misjudged the catch and had it go off the heels of his palms.
That batter went on to score a century. In a T10. We lost by 54 runs.
We lost the next game by six wickets with 17 balls to spare to go back down I-81 with a whitewash in our back pockets, but that didn't dim the spirit of a cohort of players who made history that day, and some of whom played competitive cricket for the first time in their lives. Cricket became a club sport at ETSU - a type of student organization distinct from the athletic department - on March 26, and played its first-ever game on April 25. Reflecting on it during the two and a half hour drive home, I was amazed that it had come together and stuck. I had spent weeks working, wondering, waiting for the other shoe to drop that would make the whole thing fall apart... and it never did. It was an empowering thing, and it also offered me a moment of real clarity not just about the game, but about myself.
The niche sport I have allowed to consume my life and free time (and would do it again) is, and will continue to be, an underdog story in the Appalachian highlands. Appalachia is an underdog story in and of itself, but in a place where any amount of disposable income feels like extravagant wealth, cricket is a tough sell. There are a lot of barriers to entry, and it has been that way since Abe Bailey said "Empire" in his elevator pitch at Lord's.
Cricket in the Tri-Cities is most commonly played on concrete, sometimes straight-up in parking lots, but that suited the folks playing it just fine. Cricket is a street game in South Asia where anything that stands up can be a wicket and six-and-out is an unspoken rule, and those are the people playing the game in Johnson City. The nearest synthetic pitch is the one in Blacksburg; the nearest natural surface is Church Street Park (yes, the one MLC played on). The scarcity of dedicated space meant progressing the game to a more formal competitive level would be challenging. Tennis ball and tape ball cricket are the norm here, and a very small but firmly established community of immigrants has kept watch for the game for several years now. The Muslim Community of Northeast Tennessee (MCNET) has even put in a concrete pitch on their recreational fields, and tape ball games are lively community functions.
Cricket at ETSU began after a fashion in 2023, when a group of students who played tennis ball cricket on the weekends were encouraged by the university's International Office to incorporate it for better facilities access and to recruit new students. Most of the students who were part of the club graduated, and by the fall of 2025, the club was dormant.
That's where I came in. Back in the fall, I was interested in the story of college cricket, and particularly in the story of the sport along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains in schools like Virginia Tech and West Virginia, which laid claim to a total of five national championships over the last 20 years. That's how I met Sunmeet Maheshwari, the president of the cricket club at Virginia Tech. At his suggestion for the story, I made the trip to Aldie, in the DC suburbs, for the Collegiate Cricket League's Atlantic Regional in November. That turned into a story of its own, one of my favorites in a year of writing Stumps & Stripes. As the sun began to set on a fantastic Saturday gorging myself on live cricket, buoyed the foolhardiness of seeing so many college guys playing the sport, I asked Sunmeet a fateful question: if I could get a squad together, would he and his fellow Hokies want to play in the spring?
In quiet moments, I can still hear his enthusiastic "absolutely" like a clarion call. I didn't realize how much it would drive me over the ensuing weeks and months. After surviving the November crossover season in college sports (where football and basketball are played at the same time), I got to work on the project. A short, enthusiastic conversation with the head of the International Office netted the idea immediate support, and they helped get the word out.
It felt like it was going to fall apart right at the outset. The last club president, one of only two people remaining from the original group, gave it a shot but struggled with recruiting and couldn't balance it with his PhD studies, but committed to playing if we could pull it off (he kept his word, too - he made the trip with us and kept wicket in the first game). We roped in a handful of other students who pounded pavement to get students to come to practice. We ended up with a cohort from across the cricketing world, with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Zimbabwe all represented in the group we ended up taking to Blacksburg. It was probably one of the most diverse cricket teams in the country, and we were about to add to it.
After all their efforts to recruit their fellow internationals, we were still two players short, so I got on the horn with a good friend and former ETSU classmate who was plugged into the local network of American cricket's holy grail: baseball players. I have a friend who was an All-American here while I was a student broadcaster, and he gave me the name of Will, who was actually the president of ETSU's club baseball team. After clarifying that I myself was not looking to join that team at 36 with a bad shoulder and the athleticism of a cardboard cutout of Barney Fife, I got him on board, and he brought three others with him. We also got a grad student who played baseball at the NAIA level a few years back, and two of my student workers decided to give the game a shot, including Bull, a heavyset fellow originally from Louisiana who was sold on the game by Rahkeem Cornwall highlights. More on him in a minute.
The practices were fascinating. For four hours a week for four weeks, we put our players through whatever we could manage with scattered numbers since not everyone could make every practice. Leather ball practice broke two bats, including one that snapped clean in half in the hands of a baseball player. Another baseball player slid across the line for a run and shredded the bindings on a leg guard. One guy dropped his bat when he ran. We cut across all skill levels, from experienced high-level amateurs to people who had to break their fear of the ball. There's probably a book to be written in it.
The games themselves were an adventure. The square boundaries at Virginia Tech are very short, in the neighborhood of 40 meters and possibly slightly less. Rain had hit earlier than anticipated, delaying the start to game one and putting us in a lightning hold at the innings break. Our captain didn't have the right shoes and kept slipping on his landing, which affected his bowling; our Nepali swing ace couldn't get reliable movement on the ball, so he had to improvise and still got whacked. The ball had to be changed multiple times because the leather in the seam swelled up from all the water in the outfield. Once we got to our feet, we were respectable, and our opener from Bangladesh carried his bat through the first innings - well, two bats, the first one split at the handle - and scored a respectable 67* off 41. He added another 62 in the second game, but VT chased down our 101 with relative ease. The Hokies were terrific sports, though, and the handshake line was lively with smiles and laughs in line with the spirit of cricket we've all come to know and love.
Perhaps the best example of that spirit, though, was what happened between the end of the day's play and the handshakes.
Bull didn't play in the first game. He's not really ready to bat, but he had been working on his bowling, attempting both leg spin and off spin. He was in the field for game two, but he didn't bowl. VT's batters agreed to stay out for an over to let Bull have an over after the game was won. He had been bowling spin for less than a month, so he struggled with his accuracy and bowled a boatload of wides, but the ball turned, and his fair deliveries proved hard to hit. He spent the entire drive home talking my ear off about ways he wanted to get better, about fitness and nutrition and getting in better shape to play the sport. He's dead set on watching the CPL this summer to see his idol Rahkeem the Dream in action with the Antigua & Barbuda Falcons.
Our NAIA baseball player still comes to practice even with no games left for him to play, just because he loves it; I just taught him how to bowl, and he's delivering some serious heat. A club baseball player is going to try to play both sports next year. We have feelers out to area high school ADs about baseball and softball players who are done with their games but could be excellent cricketers, and we have opened a recruiting pipeline to MCNET that has already borne fruit. We've got something real here, and all four wheels are on the ground and rolling now. That gives me a chance to think about how it all came together and find the bigger meaning in it.
In all of that, I learned something: we are not passengers.
Cricket has a lot of problems. A lot of problems. It's easy to criticize the state of the game, and it's easier still to just get frustrated by all the weird niche stuff that goes on and give up on it. I can write sneering social media posts with the best of them on my day, but it didn’t feel right to do that and not do something more active to grow the sport. Despite all its challenges, people love it. People who are exposed to the game for the first time have rave reviews about their experience and keep coming back for more. The game has appeal once it’s put in front of people, and someone has to do that work for the game to grow the way everyone inside the game thinks it’s capable of.
The grassroots are not some abstract concept of kids in some other town getting exposed to the game by imagined figures who are definitely not us. Grassroots cricket is the cricket we live: it's the six inches in front of our faces. It is the most direct way we engage with and facilitate the sport. If the game is to grow here, it doesn’t start with ACE or USA Cricket - it starts with people on the ground, like me, who have just enough cash and social resources and just enough ambition to get the game moving. Cricket feels so distant and disjointed in America partly because America is so big and our cricket is so small, but the reality is that until people in our neighborhoods get serious about the game, it won't go anywhere even if the board has good ideas. We are the ones that have to take the initiative on the ground. MacKenzie Scott is not going to drop a money bomb on American cricket, and even if she did, that money could only reinforce the work being done on the ground. That person can be you, reading this right now, just as easily as it was me.
That lesson is not exclusive to cricket or to sports. Sports just happens to be my lane where passion converges with sufficient expertise to create a confident approach to new ideas. There are people in every community like me, but their lanes might be music or horticulture or something else. Going to work in my lane has made my community better in its own little way, and if everyone who could do that went out and did it, we could accomplish a lot and would be less isolated from one another. That's something I think people understand academically, but until you go out and get your hands dirty with the work, it's easy to underestimate what a few determined people are capable of.
I’m capable of more than I ever though about doing in the game: inspired by our students’ embrace of the game, I’ve done a coaching course with Royals Sports Group and have my ICC Coaching Foundation certificate. I’m giving myself a breather before pursuing a Level 1 certification, even if I have to fly to the Caribbean for the in-person evaluation. It’s clear that the game has a higher ceiling here, and I’m someone who can advocate for it, expand its reach, and be a connector between people who brought the game with them from the other side of the world and people whose only interactions with cricket are with the insect. If I wait for someone else to come along, it will never get done.
I have no idea if what we’re doing here is scalable, or how sustainable it is, but I’m not going to paralyze myself thinking about the forest when I have the trees right in front of me. I have to get on the phone with VCU and Georgia Tech about games for the fall, and our guys want another crack at VT. Most importantly, though Bull needs some batting lessons, and there’s nobody else to teach him.