Banned from competing for the ICC Under-19 World Cup even after a 2007 season which earned them top honours in every international match they played, USA's junior cricketers are looking forward to making history with a tour of India. They will be the first representative US team to tour a major Test-playing nation in the history of North American cricket.
The US senior team, led by Steve Massiah and featuring some of the best young players, nearly managed to qualify for the World Cup before falling victim to bad luck and the weather. Now there is little hope that they will be able to play until the USA Cricket Association (USACA) is able to convince its own stakeholders as well as the ICC that it deserves another chance to do things right - and until that happens, USA's senior cricketers can only watch disconsolately from the sidelines.
Not so the USA juniors who are determined to forge ahead under their own steam in 2008 and beyond. They are going ahead with an ambitious agenda and have every intention of doing better than in 2007.
However, it doesn't come cheap. A four to six-week international tour could cost $100,000 for a fifteen-player squad in addition to the coach, manager and physio. A fully-fledged program of five or more tours each year could easily cost half a million dollars or more. The question is, who will pick up the tab?
For the upcoming India tour, the juniors have the support of a major sponsor: the Key Point Credit Union. It is located in the heart of Silicon Valley with branches throughout California. "Key Point's premier sponsorship of [our] tour, singling us out for [this kind of] major support, allows our players the opportunity to represent their native county in a game they love", said Hemant Buch, founder of the California Cricket Academy (CCA).
Buch said the success achieved by USA's juniors in 2007 did not come out of thin air. It was built on an annual program including world-class coaching, a very successful national tournament, and inter-club tournaments featuring the different formats to expose the youngsters to all the styles they might expect to encounter in international junior cricket. Such intensive junior set-ups exist in very few countries, although more and more are taking them up as interest in junior cricket grows worldwide.
No comments:
Post a Comment