12 Teams To Participate In New Women’s Intra-Regional Competition

USA Cricket is delighted to announce the launch of a new Intra-Regional Women’s Competition for aspiring female hard-ball cricket players. The Intra-Regionals will feature 12 teams, playing a mix of T20 and 40-over matches within 4 different geographic regions of the country during the month of June.

These Intra-Regional matches are designed to supplement the existing local women’s competitions and tournaments, and also form the first step of the new domestic structure, which starts to establish a clear pathway for female players from grassroots through to representative cricket.

Following the Intra-Regionals, selectors will then pick teams to represent each of the 4 regions, with Northeast vs Southeast and South West vs West, competing across a series of 2 x T20s and 2 x 50 over matches in July.

From there, separate Senior Women’s and Under 19 Women’s National Championships will be held, each featuring a West Conference team (made up of players from the West and South West regional teams) taking on an East Conference team (made up of players from the Northeast and Southeast regional teams).

The Senior Women’s National Championships will be held from August 2nd – 8th and will feature 3 x T20s and 3 x 50 over matches.

The Women’s U19 National Championships will be held from August 11th – 13th and will feature 4 x T20s.
USA Cricket Chief Executive, Iain Higgins said, “USA Cricket is proud to be able to launch a brand-new domestic playing structure for women’s cricket in the United States, with the objective being to create more playing opportunities for women and girls to play with and against each other, as well as to establish a clear pathway for female players to develop from grassroots cricket through to the National Women’s U19 and Senior teams.

We have placed particular importance in our Foundational Plan on women’s cricket over the next three years and we feel that this structure will help to add new playing opportunities into the calendar and allow us to begin building out the potential for the women’s game in a way that has never been done before.

Although the creation of a domestic playing structure is an important step forward, we recognize that there is a lot of additional work to do to be able to engage more women and girls at all levels of the sport and attract them into the sport in the first instance. We look forward to making further announcements about the initiatives that we are planning in this respect when we publish the evolving Women and Girls Engagement Plan in due course.”

Chair of the USA Women and Girls Committee, Nadia Gruny, “The new structure for women’s cricket in America is the culmination of a significant amount of work by many of those already involved in women’s cricket within the USA. With the overall player pool still being relatively small, there is no doubt that we need to look at ways to expand the playing base and we felt that a critical first step was to establish a domestic structure with playing opportunities for women and girls at the local and national level.

The new three-tiered approach complements the privately organized competitions that already exist and will allow the best players to come through the system and follow a pathway towards playing representative cricket. We now have an exciting year for the women’s program after such a long time without any cricket and we have designed this new structure with our international playing commitments for the rest of the year in mind and believe that this will help give us great preparation, momentum and pride for representing the US, going into those tournaments.

We are looking forward particularly to holding the Women’s Senior National Championships, and, for the first time ever in this country, a separate Women’s U19 National Championships will also be staged, both in the month of August.”

The teams for the Intra-regionals will all be made up of women and girls who registered with USA Cricket following the request for all those who wanted to participate in hard ball cricket in this exciting new pathway. The locations and regions of the 12 teams set to participate in the first edition of matches are set out below, and further details of the full playing schedule, team captains, coaching and support staff will be announced later in the week:

USA Cricket Women’s Intra-Regional Teams