By Special Correspondent to newyorkcricket.com
Newyorkcricket.com in conjunction with the Tribeca Film Festival and its corporate sponsors American Express, Time Warner Cable, and ESPN, facilitated the debut of cricket at the Tribeca/ESPN Sports Day at the annual Family Festival Street Fair last weekend, in downtown Manhattan.
John Aaron (left) of Atlantis Cricket Club keeps a close eye on the scene. Photos by Zaheer Saffie
This web site was invited to provide the staging of the sport of cricket as part of the annual Street Fair, which also saw the staging of other sports such as fencing, American football, and baseball.
With junior wickets set up on the northern sidewalk of N Moore Street in Tribeca, and alongside tables with tons of cricket literature manned by the New York City PSAL’s Commissioner of Cricket Basset Thompson and Lorna Austin, Cricket Coordinator and Assistant Administrator to PSAL Director Donald Douglas, and cricket volunteers, several youngsters were introduced to the sport of cricket on-the-spot.
The debut of cricket as part of the street festival was welcomed by several parents who inquired where their children could enroll in a cricket academy in New York. The unfortunate answer was no such academy exists within the environs of New York City at the moment, at least not for those under the age of eight, as many of the inquisitive and participating youngsters were.
It was amazing to watch young boys and girls who had never before held a cricket bat, quickly adapt to the use of eye and hand coordination in making contact with the ball and many times hitting it along the paved sidewalk or roadway. This was in contrast to those youngsters who have been exposed to baseball, holding the bat parallel to the ground and swinging in a horizontal manner.
Students from Stuyvesant high school with coach Mohamed Zaffie Khan.
The PSAL personnel and newyorkcricket.com volunteers must be congratulated for being on the site from early in the morning. The braved a slight cold chill, with winds coming off of the nearby Hudson River, and on a day when the sun only peeked and shared its warmth intermittently.
The distribution of ICC supplied literature aimed at introducing youngsters to the sport of cricket and titled “What is cricket?” was widely distributed to many curious onlookers, parents, and young sports enthusiasts, including a pair of brothers all decked out in baseball cleats and attire and who anxiously awaited their turns to try out at the sport of cricket.
With a greater sense of awareness and what is involved in staging the sport as part of the annual street festival, it is hoped that more volunteers will show up next year to help spread the gospel according to cricket.
A kid play a stroke as Ryan Balram of Big Apple Cricket Club looks on.