East Lake Park welcomes cricket teams on Sundays

Even though there are people hitting balls with bats on Sunday afternoons at East Lake Park, the sport isn’t baseball — it’s cricket. 

Birmingham Cricket Club team manager and active player Rajen Shah said last season, after spending the last few years playing cricket at only the East Thomas Park grounds, they began looking around for a second field to play. 

“Our teams were growing, and one field was not going to be enough,” he said. 

When the city of Birmingham told them to check out East Lake Park, Shah said, they were excited to find that it was big enough. All eight of the Birmingham-based cricket teams, along with many of its avid watchers and local cricket fans, pitched in the funds needed to put down the artificial turf and concrete slab at the park so they could play. The city of Birmingham was also a huge help, Shah said.

Cricket, which originated in England, is a sport played in the middle of the field — unlike baseball — between two teams of 11 people. Each team takes turns batting and playing the field, with the goal to score the largest amount of runs through an open space while avoiding outs. 

Shah, who said he grew up playing cricket before he came to America, said his team, along with several others, traveled to cities like Atlanta to participate in tournaments for a long time. Now they are focusing on expanding locally and only occasionally going out-of-state for tournaments. Recently, they even added a youth league, which also plays at East Lake Park. 

“For most youngsters, they’ve never seen cricket because they were born here. So we wanted to introduce the game that some of their parents played. Also, the sport is the third most-played sport in the world,” Shah said. 

Last season, they noticed “a lot of people” were coming out to watch the local teams play each other. This season, which runs from mid-March to mid-November, Shah said, they’re excited to introduce the game to even more people. 

“Of course, there are always questions, because for most of them, it’s a very different new game, even though it’s an English game. It’s not big in a smaller city like Birmingham,” Shah said. 

They welcome newcomers to watch and learn the sport, which generally last two and a half hours, he said. Cricket is also more fast-paced than baseball, he said, so it can be really exciting to watch. 

Each year, Shah and the other teams also host a weekend tournament with music, food and games against out-of-towners. 

For more information about joining the league, contact Shah at 240-0501.