Cricket catching schools’ interest
Asif Ali loves the game, follows the national team of Pakistan where he was born, taught some of his friends the rules and, at just 12 years of age, plays in a league for grown men.
But on Tuesday, he got to play cricket against and with his age group.
The second Hamilton Wentworth District School Board Elementary School Cricket Tournament was held at Redeemer College, and entries — 18 teams from 14 schools — rose 50 per cent from last year’s inaugural event. So they’re getting something right.
“What we’re trying to do here is allow kids to have fun and participate in a game they don’t really know too much about,” says Trevor Hahn, a teacher at Stoney Creek’s Lake Avenue Elementary School, who co-ordinates the tournament along with Amy Clemens of Hillcrest and Matthew Mace of Green Acres.
“A lot of the students come in to this with a set skill already in three-pitch or baseball: all the elements are there in the catching, the pitching and the hitting, although you are hitting on more of a vertical plane in cricket as opposed to a horizontal plane.”
Based on the rising popularity of the British-founded game in the immediate GTA, a small but steady growth in local high school competition (there are now five teams playing coed cricket in the HWDSB secondary school panel) and the dramatic jump in registration for the elementary tournament, what went around is coming around again.
Spectator files show that cricket was the first organized sport in Hamilton (1847), reflecting the British Isles roots of the general populace at that time.
Cricket was also the main tenant of the old HAAA grounds that eventually played host to seven Grey Cup games and housed the town football team, named the Tigers.
Evolving national, and local, demographics have also had a positive impact on cricket’s new popularity.
“At some schools, it’s completely demographic,” Hahn says. “At our school, with its positioning and its population, a lot of the students come from cricket-playing countries already: Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka. Most of our students support the Pakistani and the Indian cricket teams. So they already know about it.
“But we also have, for instance, Ancaster Meadows and Flamborough Central here, a very different demographic. I think from a perspective of ‘around the city’ we have all our bases covered.”
Samantha Togher and Maddy Scott are Grade 8 students at Gatestone Elementary School, multi-sport athletes who both played in this tourney last year and returned because they liked the initial exposure to cricket.
“It’s interesting,” Togher says, citing the unique, and complicated, scoring system. “I’ve heard about it from people at our school who played it. It’s the only time we play all year. We do play it in gym, but I wish we could play it at school (as part of a school house league team).”
Scott says she had fun last year and likes learning new sports. “So it’s kind of interesting to learn from people who play it from other cultures,” she said. “They had to teach us the rules last year because they grew up with it.
“The way the field is set up, I’ve never seen it before. It’s a 360 field. And you kind of have to adjust your bats differently than baseball because the ball can come from everywhere and they can spin it. Hitting is hard.”
The tournament was initiated through cricket enthusiast Ranil Mendes of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, which covers the cost of the dome rental at Redeemer. Canadian Tire’s ubiquitous Jump Start program put the equipment into schools.
Mike Grobe, the HWDSB athletic supervisor for both the elementary and senior panels, says, “We’ve noticed more people are playing the sport. It’s a coed sport, so that’s a positive factor. As (the public school event) grows, so will high school cricket.”