History of cricket in the United States
The history of United States cricket begins in the 18th century. Among early Americans, cricket was as popular a bat-and-ball game as baseball. Though Americans never played cricket in great numbers, the game grew for some time. Around the time of the United States Civil War, the game began competing with baseball for participants, but then slowly declined in popularity. This was followed again by a brief golden age with the Philadelphian cricket team. This lasted until roughly the start of World War I; at this time, cricket again became less popular.
In the latter part of the 20th century, immigrants from cricket-playing nations in South Asia and the West Indies helped spark a resurgence in the game's popularity. This led to participation and success in several International Cricket Council events. In 2007, the United States of America Cricket Association was suspended by the ICC because of problems with its administration, but was again recognized beginning in 2008.
The USACA was expelled as the recognized national governing body by the ICC during its 2017 AGM. USA Cricket is now the ICC-recognized national governing body, and is responsible for administering Minor League Cricket, which is currently the highest level of domestic competition in the USA. It is played in the relatively recently invented T20 format of cricket, with games lasting roughly three hours, separating it from the longer-format cricket played throughout most of American history.
Early developments
Cricket was being played in British North America by at least the beginning of the 18th century. The earliest definite reference to American cricket is in the 1709 diaries of William Byrd of Westover on his James River estates in Virginia. By the American Revolution, the game was so popular that the troops at Valley Forge played matches; George Washington himself joined in at least one game of "wicket." John Adams told Congress that if leaders of simple cricket clubs could be called "presidents," the leader of the new nation might be called something more grand. Cricket continued to develop slowly as a recreational sport as America gained independence in 1783.A variation of cricket known as wicket was played before the 20th century in the New England area.
History following independence
Cricket enjoyed its greatest popularity along the East Coast corridor between Philadelphia and New York. A contemporary report notes that upwards of 5,000 people played the game in those cities. In 1833, students at Haverford College established what is generally accepted as the first cricket club exclusively for Americans. This club was short-lived, but helped to keep interest in the sport alive in Philadelphia, leading to the foundation of the Philadelphia Cricket Club in 1854 and the Germantown and Young America clubs in 1855. By this time, Philadelphia had become the unofficial "Cricket Capital of America."The United States participated in the first international cricket match, which saw St George's Cricket Club play Canada on 24 September 1844, at the former Bloomingdale Park in Manhattan. The match was attended by some 10,000 spectators. It is today "the longest international rivalry in cricket, in fact in any sport." Wagers of around $120,000 were placed on the outcome of the match.
As late as 1855, the New York press was still devoting more space to coverage of cricket than to baseball. In the mid-19th century, the sport was played in approximately 125 cities in 22 states. Roughly 500 officially established clubs existed and it is probable that in 1860 there were 10,000 boys and men in America who had actively played the sport for at least a season. Abraham Lincoln, later to be president, had watched two American cities play each other in an 1849 cricket match.
Sides from England toured the US and Canada after the English cricket seasons of 1859, 1868 and 1872, in tours organized as commercial ventures. The 1859 team comprised six players from the All England Eleven and six from the United All England Eleven, and was captained by George Parr. They played five matches, winning them all. There were no first-class fixtures. The match at New York attracted a crowd that was claimed to be 10,000, all that the ground would hold.
The 1868 tourists were led by Edgar Willsher and those of 1872–73 by R.A. Fitzgerald. The latter side included W.G.Grace.
Most of the matches of these early English touring teams were played "against odds", that is to say the home team was permitted to have more than eleven players in order to make a more even contest.
Rise of baseball
In spite of all this American growth in the game, it was slowly losing ground to a newcomer. In many cities, local cricket clubs were contributing to their own demise by encouraging crossover to the developing game of baseball. After the United States Civil War the Cincinnati Red Stockings brought a talented young bowler from the St. George's Cricket Club in New York to serve as a player and manager of the team. Harry Wright applied the "scientific" batting and specialized placement of fielders that he had learned in cricket to his new sport. This development was instrumental in creating the Cincinnati team's undefeated 1869 season. It also helped to secure the place of baseball as one of the most popular sports in the country.It may have been during the Civil War that baseball secured its place as America's game. An army making a brief stop at a location could easily organise a game of baseball on almost any clear patch of ground, while cricket required a carefully prepared pitch. After the Civil War, baseball became a much more organized sport than cricket in America, with more money and competition available to baseball players across the country; thus, baseball began to poach players and administrators from the world of cricket. Nick Young, who served for 25 years as the president of the National League, was originally a successful cricketer. It was not until the Civil War that he took up baseball because "it looked like cricket for which his soul thirsted."
It has been suggested that the fast-paced quick play of baseball was more appealing to Americans than the technical slower game of cricket, which at the time was played over a much longer duration than baseball; other reasons for cricket's demise include Americans' desire to have some type of national game distinct from the games of their former colonial master, and cricket clubs for the English-American elite rejecting Irish, Italian and German immigrants from play. Some attempts were made to nativize cricket in a way that would reduce its length and other perceived disadvantages relative to baseball; one example of this was wicket, an American variation of cricket which could be played in an afternoon. However, the natural tendency toward baseball was compounded by terrible American defeats at the hands of a traveling English side in 1859, which may have caused Americans to think that they would never be successful at this English game. By the end of the Civil War, most cricket fans had given up their hopes of broad-based support for the game. Baseball filled the role of the "people's game" and cricket became an amateur game for gentlemen.
Rise of amateur cricket
Following the Civil War, cricket grew into an amateur sport with much less broad appeal than it had had before. This manifestation can be seen in the foundation of the Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club. The club was to be based on "the broadest and most liberal interpretation of the terms 'gentlemen' and amateur." They were not that interested in playing baseball, but in founding a more responsive club in the area than the St George's Cricket Club. The members of the Seabright Lawn Tennis Club became so interested in cricket that they convinced club officials to sod their cricket ground with turf imported from England and had the name of the club changed to the Seabright Lawn Tennis and Cricket Club in 1885.Nowhere was this new trend in cricket more evident than in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is typically considered to be the center of North American cricket, with a long history of teams and matches. In 1865 a group of young people in that city founded the Merion Cricket Club. They were very emphatic about the purity of the sport and thwarted early attempts by some to convert the club into a baseball club. In the end, the club members passed a resolution that the remaining baseball equipment "be sold off as quickly as possible" to guarantee the purpose of the club. Following the lead of New York and Philadelphia, other cities saw new clubs form. These included St Louis, Boston, Detroit, and Baltimore.
Intercollegiate level
formed a cricket team in 1833, generally accepted as the first cricket club exclusively for Americans. Haverford and the University of Pennsylvania formed a strong rivalry, with the first match played on May 7, 1864, believed to be start of the third-oldest intercollegiate sporting contest in America, after the 1852 Harvard-Yale crew and 1859 Amherst-Williams baseball matches. Haverford and Penn then proceeded to play each other for three consecutive years until 1869, when the Haverford faculty banned cricket away from their college grounds. From 1875 and through 1880, Haverford College, Columbia College and University of Pennsylvania fielded a varsity elevens, which played a few matches each year against each other and other club teams.The post-Civil War decades saw an increase in cricket-playing at the intercollegiate level, and it looked like cricket might expand beyond its strongholds at Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1881 delegates from several collegiate cricket clubs, including Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton College, University of Pennsylvania and Trinity College, joined to form The Intercollegiate Cricket Association. During the 44 years that The Intercollegiate Cricket Association existed Penn won The Intercollegiate Cricket Association championship 23 times, Haverford won such championship 19 times, and Harvard won it 6 times, none after 1899. The group was plagued by troubles and withdrawals. Haverford College and Cornell University later joined the ICA, but Yale University and Johns Hopkins University never got around to fielding teams. The ICA lasted until 1924 when it crowned its last champion. These collegiate clubs generally drew their talent from pools at secondary schools which also fielded team and played in interscholastic competitions in this period.
In July 1895 an international cricket match between Canada and the United States was played on the Manheim grounds in Germantown section of Philadelphia with six of the United States team being Penn student athletes and, in September of that year, past and then current members of Penn's varsity cricket team played past and then current members of the English cricket teams of Oxford and Cambridge resulting in Penn defeating the Oxford-Cambridge team by one hundred runs. This was not surprising as in the last two and a half decades of the 19th century and first decade of the 20th century, Philadelphia was the center of cricket in the United States Cricket had gained in popularity among the upper class from their travels abroad and cricket clubs sprung up all across the Eastern Seaboard.