New York City public schools have gone googly-eyed for cricket – the sport of googlies and overs with breaks for tea.
Next year, the city will become the first school district in the country to recognize cricket as an official varsity sport, giving the world’s second-most popular game behind soccer a high-profile foothold in the land of baseball.
As many as seven schools in Brooklyn and Queens have expressed interest in fielding teams when the Public Schools Athletic League launches the season in the spring, education officials said, and recent weekend clinics have drawn scores of students.
“When I saw the ad on the wall I said, ‘Damn, I’ve got to be dreaming,’ ” said Avinash Sookhwa, 18, a junior at John Adams HS in Queens who emigrated from Guyana in 2004.
“It was a feeling like being down to the last point and the game is in your hands. All I wanted to do was play.”
Sookhwa was one of about 80 students who gathered yesterday around a 22-yard-long packed dirt pitch in Cunningham Park in Queens for a chance to defend wickets against fast-moving flippers and top-spinners (which is cricket lingo for off-speed pitches).
It was the second clinic organized by the PSAL and run by the United States of America Cricket Association in an effort to gauge interest in the sport among high school students.
Most of the participants were immigrants, or children of immigrants, from the Caribbean and South Asia, where cricket is king and starry-eyed youngsters dream of growing into all-rounders (a complete player in cricket speak).
“In India, we played when it was cold and when it was hot, it didn’t matter,” said Vivek Sharma, 17, of Long Island City HS, who immigrated here when he was 10.
They are also the children of a growing number of immigrants who mark off makeshift cricket field boundaries in neighborhood parks on weekends to reconnect with their native lands.
“Just driving around Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx, you see a lot of people playing cricket,” said Eric Goldstein, who oversees the PSAL for the city Department of Education.
The seven schools looking to field teams are Franklin D. Roosevelt and William E. Grady high schools in Brooklyn, and Aviation, John Adams, Long Island City, Richmond Hill and Queens Teaching high schools in Queens.