Penn Sports Plus: Cricket Edition

Fresh off a victory at the American College Cricket Mid-Atlantic Regional Championships on Oct. 14, the Penn Cricket Club is one of Penn’s top — and most unheralded — club sports. We sat down with two of the Quakers’ elite players to discuss the team’s recent success.

Daily Pennsylvanian: I was wondering if you could go into detail about the tournaments you’ve had success in recently.

Bowler Adithya Nagaraja: Obviously we did win the Mid-Atlantic Regional tournament. We also played in the Ivy League Championships, which was held like, two weeks previous to that. And we won that as well.

Captain Subash Poudel: That was the first Ivy League Championship, I mean, it was the inaugural Ivy League Championship, and we won that. And that was a pretty sweet victory given that the week before that, we had lost a game there against Harvard … but we finally played them, beat them, and that was a really good victory for all of us.

DP: What’s the level of competition like and what’s the level of interest [in cricket] at the other Ivy League Schools?

AN: I mean, there’s definitely interest, and in recent years it’s started to pick up. Dartmouth also has a club and they joined American College Cricket recently as well.

SP: I think almost all the Ivy schools play, and I mean, even in the United States in general, the sport is growing really big. Because at Nationals [held] every year in March, almost 30-40 colleges come to that, and there are eight to 10 regionals happening every year. So that’s a pretty big number of regionals and nationals … which gives us good competition at the end of the day. It’s always fun to play against a better team.

DP: Now in terms of recruiting, how do you guys work towards building up a talent base at Penn?

AN: Right now it’s mostly word of mouth. A lot of people sign up during the activities fair every year, but a lot of it is through word of mouth and through contacts that we had previously.

SP: And this year we’re doing good, so hopefully we get more interest next year, because every year some other people graduate. Ours is always a young team, but if you look at some other teams that really play a lot of alumni, our team is more undergraduate-based.

DP: Now, how often do you guys practice and actually have match competition?

AN: We usually practice once or twice a week.

DP: At Vagelos [Field]?

SP: Vagelos, Franklin [Field], Penn Park…

AN: Wherever PennRec puts us.

DP: And then tournaments, it’s just like … a couple a year?

SP: Every semester we have Regionals … during the spring semester, which is kind of big for us, we have Nationals. During the fall semester, when the weather is still good, we try to make some trips, just like [when] we went to Harvard to play a game there, and we visit nearby clubs … so we generally try to fix a game every week or every other week.

DP: So how would you like to see the cricket club grow at Penn in the future?

AN: Definitely see if we can get more people involved, that would be a plus. And maybe to get a second team involved in all of our tournaments as well, to get like, a development squad, that would be awesome … what we want to see happening later on is people who have no idea how to play cricket … we want to set up a coaching program so they can learn to play the game as well.