For the love of the game: Hoover locals start youth cricket league, eye adult tournaments at Hoover Met

Many people around the globe love cricket. Behind soccer, it is widely considered the world’s second most popular sport.

But the bat-and-ball game isn’t quite as adored in Alabama, where the mention of its name is more likely to conjure images of an insect.

Vaidya Nathan, a Hoover resident, wants to change that.

Along with his wife, Archana, and friend Venu Thota, Nathan started a youth cricket club called the Little Masters League. It aims to teach cricket, regarded internationally as a gentleman’s game, to kids ages 7 to 16.

“I found that a lot of kids, they were playing in their backyards, but they were not getting proper training,” Nathan said. “The intent is to get them to learn cricket the proper way.”

Nathan grew up in India, where he said people are intensely devoted to the sport. Nathan’s passion for it didn’t dwindle when he moved to Birmingham in the late 1990s.

To stay connected, he helped start the Birmingham Cricket Club, an adult team that now plays in the statewide Montgomery Premier League. The MPL was co-founded by Hoover resident Hiren Desai, who also helps coach the youth cricket club.

“It is very important to get them in at the beginning of the career,” Desai said. “That’s when they find which sport is good for [them].”

The Little Masters League has gathered weekly from April to September since 2017. During meetings, which are held in Hoover and other metro Birmingham municipalities, kids receive instruction on how to bowl — cricket’s version of pitching — as well as bat and field. Then, they scrimmage.

“This is something that will keep them athletic,” Archana Nathan said. “It’s so similar to baseball.”

Baseball and cricket share many basic similarities, beginning with the objective. The goal of the game is to score more runs than the other team by hitting a ball into unmanned spaces while avoiding outs. Success requires keen hand-eye coordination and power.

“There’s definitely fun in the game,” Thota said. “It’s a team game. It’s a team sport. Just like playing baseball, why wouldn’t anyone play baseball?”

Cricket, however, is played on an oval field and consists of one big “inning” in which each team hits through its entire 10-man order. Bats are rectangular, and balls are wrapped in leather with a seam running across the middle.

Teams score runs by having batsmen race back and forth between wickets, not around bases, after a ball enters the field of play. Balls that clear the field’s outer boundary on the fly earn six runs, while balls that roll or skip past the boundary earn four runs. Matches can be high-scoring affairs, with teams typically reaching triple figures.

“You never know who the ball’s going to come to, but everybody’s involved somehow,” said Kapil Nathan, the Nathans’ 15-year-old son who is a Hoover High School freshman. “I think it’s good. Everybody should learn how to play it.”

The Little Masters League tailors the sport to its audience. 

Instead of playing with a traditional leather ball, which is hard, the league uses a tennis ball so kids aren’t as fearful when they step up to bat.

Archana Nathan said close to 50 kids showed up to the first practice when the league launched two years ago. As word gets out, she and her family hope to see it grow.

“It’ll definitely spread,” Kapil Nathan said. “Just give it time.”

For more information about the Little Masters League, email Vaidya Nathan at vaidyaatdst@gmail.com or Venu Thota at venu_thota@yahoo.com.

Adult cricket

Additional efforts are under way to bring adult cricket tournaments to the Hoover Metropolitan Complex.

The Telugu Association of Birmingham, Alabama, a nonprofit Indian cultural organization also known as TABALA, partnered with Destination Hoover International to put on an adult cricket demonstration tournament at the Hoover Met in early May.

Almost 100 players on eight teams from the Birmingham area participated. Hoover Mayor Frank Brocato, several councilmen and the Hoover High School baseball team received instruction on how to play the game.

Subbu Bodem, the founding president of TABALA who has been putting on cricket tournaments in Birmingham for 17 years, said his group loves the Hoover Met fields and wants to move some or all of its tournaments to Hoover. The majority of players in the May tournament live in Hoover, he said. 

There usually are three or four tournaments a year in the Birmingham area, some of which draw teams from Tuscaloosa, Montgomery and Florida, said Bodem, who lives in Lake Cyrus. Tournament directors are working with Hoover Met Complex managers and would love to start having tournaments in Hoover sometime this summer, but it all depends on field availability and finances, he said. Find out more about TABALA on the group’s Facebook page.

– Jon Anderson contributed to this story.