Washington Freedom owner Sanjay Govil hopes to expand cricket's mass appeal.
DC’s newest professional sports team, the Washington Freedom, will make its Major League Cricket debut on Friday with a match against Seattle in Texas.
The first pro cricket league in the US, MLC has four other teams—Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco—and will play its 2023 season matches at Dallas’ home stadium and at a cricket ground in North Carolina. By 2025, however, the Freedom hope to play home matches in the area at a dual-use baseball/cricket stadium built in partnership with George Mason University.
Cricket is estimated to be the second-most popular sport in the world behind soccer, but its appeal is concentrated in South Asia, the Caribbean, South Africa, and Oceania. In the US, the Freedom and MLC initially will be counting on fan interest from South Asian and West Indian immigrant communities that already have flourishing amateur leagues—but future growth will come from building a broader base of support.WashingtonianTell us a bit about your background.
I moved to Alabama in my senior year of high school and went to Auburn University. I used to play in Auburn, but obviously there was no mechanism at that time to watch matches. So there was a void for a few years when there was no cricket for me. Then I moved to upstate New York to work for IBM. I did my master’s at Syracuse again and played for the Syracuse cricket team. At that time there was no real league, so we had created our own league in upstate New York.
People like us, as we’ve grown, our children have grown, and the amount of kids who are playing cricket now at different academies across the United States is mind boggling. We have parents who literally take their kids at 7 AM and come back at 4 PM for cricket.
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