Rory Carroll in San Jose 

Cricket comes to Silicon Valley: ‘Almost every city here has its own grounds’

Engineers from southern Asia, drawn to California by the tech boom born of Google, Apple and others, have brought their sport and culture
  
  

Ever Young cricket team prepare to play Santa Clara. Both teams are members of the Bay Area Cricket Alliance, in San Francisco
Ever Young cricket team prepare to play Santa Clara. Both teams are members of San Francisco’s Bay Area Cricket Alliance, which has grown from eight teams to 17. Photograph: Robert Gumpert/Guardian

It is not a start-up, and won’t mint any billionaires, but Silicon Valley may eventually claim a sport hitherto spurned in the the United States as another badge of innovation.

Recently arrived tech workers from southern Asia, especially India, are helping to galvanise a cricket boom, as new teams in the San Francisco bay area are reinvigorating a sub-culture that began with the 1990s dotcom bubble.

“Technology and cricket are intertwined. People come seeking jobs and bring their culture and sport,” said Abrar Ahmad, a founder of the Bay Area Cricket Alliance, a non-profit that has seen its number of teams more than double from eight to 17. “Almost every city here has its own grounds. We’ve come a long way.”

In addition to the men’s teams there is now also a youth league, a women’s team, an academy, tournaments, equipment stores and practice facilities. Two of the four indoor nets beside the ProCricShop in San Jose, said owner Suraj Viswanathan, stretch to 136 feet, “the longest in the world”. A serial entrepreneur, he is also a vice-president of the cricket alliance.

The sport remains a nano-attraction compared to the crowds that watch the Oakland Raiders or San Francisco 49ers. Passersby tend to gaze in blank incomprehension at a distant ancestor to baseball that dates from Tudor England and includes arcana such as overs, creases, byes and sixes.

Bay area evangelists claim, with fervour akin to a startup, that the game is scaling up and gaining market share thanks to the latest tech boom drawing more south Asian migrants to the likes of Google, Facebook, Cisco and Apple.

“It goes up and down depending on the industry,” said Arun Subbu, 40, an IT architect with IBM, helmet in one hand, bat in the other, as he prepared to enter one of ProCricShop’s batting cages. “After the dotcom bust, the talent left. Now it’s back.”

Ahmad, 50, was a teenager when he moved from Pakistan to work in a valley humming with the start of the personal computer revolution.

The only way to play cricket in those days was to heave a jute mat onto a Toyota Corolla and seek an unoccupied park corner, he recalled. “We’d bring lawnmowers too. It wasn’t easy but it was our passion.” The sport inflated and deflated along with the dotcom bubble, then recovered. “In the past three or four years it’s climbing again,” said Ahmad, a talented batsman and wicketkeeper in his day.

About three quarters of the Bay Area Cricket Alliance’s 525 registered players are tech workers, according to Ahmad. The rest include taxi drivers, college students, liquor store owners, Subway managers.

The students tended to play aggressively while the the techies are said to take a cooler, more analytical approach.

Vibhav Altekar, 18, who plans to study chemical engineering at UC Davis, seemed to combine both: sweating hard during batting practice, but focused on the mental side. “Once you get to a certain level you realise it’s only partly about the physical. It’s in your mind. You have to out-think the opposition.”

Last year Altekar, the son of a hardware engineer, captained a California Cricket Academy youth team in goodwill games in England. The academy is based in Cupertino, home to Apple.

Cricketers have given presentations and demonstrations in local schools and hope it will be included in the physical education curriculum of at least one school in the Alum Rock union elementary district.

The Stanford “A” cricket club, which hosts games at the Kirigin Cellars Winery Cricket Grounds, evokes a certain English amateur ethos by calling its members “a motley and lately portly collection of aspiring intellectuals” who enjoy a hard game of cricket followed by “relaxing moments at the beer pub”.

Notwithstanding geek power, the west coast tends to be weaker than east coast teams bolstered with Caribbean expatriates, said Ahmad. Visa expirations sent a lot of talent back to India, he lamented. (Mark Zuckerberg’s immigration reform advocacy group, Fwd.US, is more concerned about the loss of engineering talent).

Cricket also loses youngsters to American football, baseball and soccer, which offer more tournaments and chances to advance.

The biggest challenge is persuading non-Asian Americans to embrace the game, and a good place to start is tech companies, said Ahmad. “These giants want to keep their employees physically and mentally fit. Ebay has soccer. Google has tennis. Why not cricket?”

In Silicon Valley fashion, the Bay Area Cricket Alliance wishes to pivot and style the game a tool for corporate productivity. “It’s great for networking and team-building,” said Ahmad, the organisations’ treasurer. “It loosens people up. They talk, share ideas. They can come up with new products.”

 

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