USA U-19 team drops out of American College Cricket Spring Break Championship

DreamCricket.com, USA's cricket destination, is now on Facebook.   Please help us popularize cricket in USA by becoming a fan of our Facebook page. 

By Peter Della Penna

USACA VP of Operations Manaf Mohamed confirmed in an email on Tuesday morning that the USA U-19 World Cup squad will not be participating in the 2010 American College Cricket Spring Break Championship, scheduled to begin on Wednesday in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Speculation had been mounting for weeks as to whether or not USA’s U-19 World Cup squad would be playing in the tournament as USACA never announced a squad. Mohamed did not say when or why the decision was made.

The news is not sitting well with teams who were looking forward to getting a chance to play matches against USA.  “I think it’s disappointing,” said Nisarg Chokshi, vice captain of Rutgers University and former captain of the Atlantic Region U-19 squad at the 2009 USACA U-19 National Championship.

The Rutgers squad arrived in Florida by plane on Tuesday morning and was supposed to play USA in their first match at the tournament on Wednesday. “We had a perfect schedule. We play USA tomorrow and we had our league matches after that. We could have understood our strengths and weaknesses by playing against them. But now we have a rest day and it’s just kind of a waste of a day.”

“[USA] were basically special guests so the games were not directly involved in the championship aspect of it,” said Jodah. 

Jodah said the rest of the teams are still going to participate and it will not affect the tournament in terms of competition points. USA’s scheduled matches against Rutgers University, York University and Montgomery College would not have counted towards the standings.

Jodah said that a revised tournament schedule would be released sometime later on Tuesday, which will now include Montgomery College playing against University of the West Indies. Jodah also said that Brian Piccolo Park will be used for the tournament in addition to the Central Broward Regional Park in an effort to have more matches on turf wickets, giving the players a chance to test themselves on a natural cricket pitch.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 10:03 am and is filed under World Cricket League. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.