As will be very obvious once you start to scroll through this web site, Michigan Cricket Academy has not been active for some time. Its fate is very typical of small, volunteer-run organizations — MCA depended on the tireless enthusiasm of just a few people (most notably, its joint head coaches Vasanth Krishnaswami and Shyam Mayasandra) to keep it going and it only ever had a relatively small membership. In the end, as so often in such cases, the model was unsustainable.
Yet, at least in my opinion, it achieved great things (scroll through these pages and you will see…) and it has left a legacy. In the last two weekends — the first two of the 2017 cricket season in Michigan — lots of teams competed in the Michigan Cricket Association‘s season-opening tournament. If you look at the score cards, you will get a sense of adult cricket in the state of Michigan. And if you look very carefully, you will see that some MCA graduates have played in the opening rounds of the 2017 Great Lakes Tournament. What you won’t be able to tell from the score cards, however, but what you might guess, if you know anything about American cricket, is that the forty-something clubs playing in Mich-CA this season are almost entirely populated by expatriates — men who grew up playing the game in major cricketing countries. And then there are the MCA boys — some born in the USA, some born elsewhere, but all of them playing in Mich-CA today because when they were young (even very small boys), they had a chance to learn the game with MCA.
I feel that it is not arrogant to say that MCA provided a model of how the game could be grown in this country and I believe that we showed how boys (and girls would have been very welcome, too, let me emphasize) who were born or grew up here could become serious and competent cricketers, and could learn to love a game so alien to most Americans today. Personally, I am very proud of what we achieved. And that is why I have not taken down this web site, even though there has been no MCA activity for some four years.
If you are looking for a place in Michigan to play the game or even to learn the game now, you should definitely turn to the Michigan Cricket Association which, with the benefit of critical mass (always a key) has gone from strength to strength in the last few years. But before you leave this site, I warmly recommend that you spend some time looking at what we did — indeed, at what we achieved.
Michigan Cricket Academy 