From the left, Sophia Persteris, 16, Aakanksha Parekh, 17, Smeet Shah, 16, and Haimi Patel, 17, after cricket practice at York Memorial Collegiate Institute, on Sept. 22, 2021.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Suburban Toronto is a long way from a corn field in Iowa.
It’s even further removed from India.
But anywhere there is a bat and a ball there are fond memories of fathers and sons playing catch.
As the 16-year-old son of an Indian immigrant, Smeet Shah’s upbringing was no different, although his own Field of Dreams moments required no glove as his family’s sport of choice was cricket, not baseball.
“We live in an apartment, so there’s not much space, but we would throw around the ball,” he says. “But it wasn’t like baseball, it was more of just, just teaching the basics.”
Those basics helped instill a love of cricket in Smeet, who considers Indian national team captain Virat Kohli a role model and the sport itself part of his birthright.
“I’m Indian, right, so it’s always been in my DNA in a sense,” Smeet says. “My dad has always put the sport onto me and I loved it.”
Fortunately for the 11th-grader, his school, Toronto’s York Memorial Collegiate Institute, is one of the 150 or so schools across Ontario that have benefited from an introduction-to-cricket program formed by global professional accounting body CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants). The program sends roving workshops to schools to show teachers the basic details of the game, with partners such as Canadian Tire providing equipment.
The schools were then able to start their own after-school or lunchtime programming, allowing kids to try the sport for the first time, while allowing others such as Smeet the opportunity to share both their skills and their heritage.
“Canada has cricket opportunities but they’re not available in every school,” he said. “Having that luxury to play cricket would be great, it’s just a new sport to pick up, just like rugby and other sports like that and it can introduce a new culture as well.”
Smeet Shah practices bowling the ball during cricket practice at York Memorial Collegiate Institute.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
That program has now morphed into the Ontario Schools Cricket Association, which was officially formed in May, 2020, and is currently holding a student competition to devise the organization’s logo. Though school sports, including cricket, are in a holding pattern because of the pandemic, the OSCA has hardly rested on its laurels. With CIMA embracing remote work and virtual conferencing it simply applied that technology to its cricket program, too.
So whenever sports are given the green light to resume, OSCA has another 300 or so trained teachers who are ready to bring cricket to their student bodies.
“This evolved into a good program,” says Keren Stephen, the chair of CIMA Canada. “Training the teachers, providing equipment – because it won’t work unless [the schools] get the equipment – and then a program for competition.”
Some schools have taken quickly to the sport. Serena Virk, a physical-education teacher at Sawmill Valley Public School in Mississauga, had a workshop with CIMA about eight years ago. Wasting little time, she invited five other schools to come to Sawmill’s playing field for a round-robin tournament, the first edition of what she calls the Peel Elementary Cricket Tournament.
By the time the tournament was last held in 2019 – before the pandemic put the brakes on the event – that number was up to 36 schools, including Sawmill.
Virk is the first to admit she knew nothing about cricket before CIMA showed up on her doorstep.
“I did not know how to play cricket. I didn’t know the rules,” she says. “I didn’t know how to make it [work for] elementary level, and [CIMA was] really good at explaining and showing how to play it at an elementary level.”
However, OSCA isn’t affiliated with either Cricket Canada or Cricket Ontario, the sport’s two governing bodies in Ontario. While there is a prevailing sentiment of the rising tide floating all boats, meaning that exposing cricket to new practitioners can only be a good thing, there are some reservations.
“We’re happy for them to go ahead and train teachers,” says Ingleton Liburd, the general manager of Cricket Canada. “But we would like them to do it within the framework of Cricket Canada coaching … because we’re a member of the Coaching Association of Canada, so these teachers will get trained and not be recognized if it’s not part of a Cricket Canada program.”
Shah Zafar, the president of Cricket Ontario, says that he has invited OSCA to come under his organization’s umbrella, but so far it has chosen to forge its own path. Cricket Ontario has its own schools program, Zafar says, and the idea of two organizations trying to achieve similar aims isn’t ideal. However, he says his door remains open, should OSCA choose to reconsider its stance.
“The parallel delivery of these services or the introduction to cricket, it doesn’t look very good, to be honest,” Zafar says.
Ranil Mendis, a board member of both CIMA Canada and OSCA, disagrees, saying the two cricketing entities have closely aligned, but differing, mandates. While Cricket Canada and Cricket Ontario are both charged with developing athletes for the national teams at varying age groups, OSCA’s main aim is simply to whet cricketing appetites.
“Our focus is not about competitive cricket or advancement of the game or building high-performance athletes,” he says. “Our focus is at the very grassroots level, and engaging kids through the game. So participation is the key word, not competition.
“So in that sense we see a distinct difference between the way we look at cricket and the way the governing bodies look at cricket.”
While Mendis says that OSCA will happily tap the governing bodies for resources, and could work more with them in the future, some overlap should occur naturally.
For instance, at York Memorial, 17-year-old Haimi Patel was introduced to the game through the OSCA program. She quickly fell in love with cricket, and is already exploring her options in the sport post-graduation.
“I did a bit of research, and I did see that for the women [Cricket Canada] is trying to build an under-19 team and I hope I can join that.”