LAUDERHILL — South Florida is home to professional sports teams of all kinds. Baseball, basketball, football, hockey, soccer — even college football is getting more professionalized.
Now professional cricket is being played in Broward County as Major League Cricket, the top-level American cricket league, is hosting matches at Broward County Stadium at Central Broward Park in Lauderhill.
“It’s a league that’s almost like the US Open in tennis. It starts and ends quickly,” said Johnny Grave, the CEO of Major League Cricket, “and the reason it does that is because we get genuinely the best players in the world coming to America to play. So we feel that T20 cricket is the most exciting version of the sport. It’s not the five-day one that all Americans think of when they think of cricket, if they’ve heard of cricket.
“And I think what we’re starting to see is that the people that come realize that it’s really athletic game. It’s a highly skillful game and a very tactical game, and they enjoy it. It’s not as complicated or as hard to follow as they probably imagined. And so it’s an easy game to follow. It’s a really exciting game.”
Broward County Stadium’s cricket field has hosted matches for more than a decade, but this is the first time the stadium has hosted top-level, domestic club matches. Major League Cricket was established in 2023 as America’s top-flight cricket league and has been hosting tournaments around the country. Although South Florida does not have a team in the competition, Broward County offered a good opportunity to host part of this year’s tournament.
“Love it,” said Los Angeles Knight Rider cricketer Corné Dry. “I’ve been in the US four to five years now, played quite a bit of cricket down here. Always love coming here. I think it’s a great ground, it’s a great vibe. Yeah, love it.”
MLC features Twenty20 cricket, a faster-paced version of the game that lasts about as long as a baseball game — not the multi-day cricket matches that people unfamiliar with the sport may have heard about.
Saturday’s first matchup, between the LA Knight Riders and MI New York, had a scattered but noisy crowd of people supporting each side. But there were plenty of empty seats at Broward County Stadium, which has a seated capacity of 5,000 and can hold up to 10,000 total fans.
“(The crowds have) not been huge but there have been some people coming out,” said Erik Petersen, a Fort Lauderdale resident. “I would love to see them kind advertise it more. I would like to see them kind of get it out into the community a little bit more, maybe work on getting a few more first-timers to come. But I thought that there’s been some nice crowds, some really good atmosphere. Obviously, people here really, really love it, and a lot of their favorite cricketers are playing here, so that makes it a really fun atmosphere.”
Fans waved flags of both the different cricket clubs and countries of their own. The league features players from all over the world, including stars like former South African captain Faf du Plessis (Texas Super Kings), West Indies international Shimron Hetmyer (Seattle Orcas), former West Indies captain Nicholas Pooran (MI New York) and American captain Monank Patel (MI New York).
“They’ve got some top international talent, and they’ve got some really good players,” said Petersen, who was wearing a Seattle Orcas shirt. “They’ve also got some of the top Americans. The US side had a pretty good showing at the World Cup last year. So they really got some big names in and some quality players.”
Grave said there are a few minor improvements he would like to see at the stadium, but overall, the slate of games in Lauderhill have gone well.
“Hoping to make much more noise when we come back and get more people attending,” Grave said. “I think (Saturday’s) crowd was probably close to 3,000 but obviously, with capacity here of nearer nine or 10, we really want to push that boat out, particularly for the weekend games. … The stadium has had a lot of improvements over the last few years, particularly last year for the World Cup, but there’s still hosting international cricket, still some improvements that we need to make to make life easier for us, operationally, for the teams. But it’s a great facility to use.”
The matches in Lauderhill continued Sunday before the league moves to Dallas, but Grave said the league expects to play in Broward County again in the future. South Florida could even get a franchise of its own to support.
“I think with the support of the county and the city and the parks folk here, we can make this an even better venue, and then it becomes more and more compelling for the owners to consider an expansion team here,” Grave said. “There’s a minor league team in Fort Lauderdale, and certainly, I think this week will have helped that narrative and that story.”