By Humzah Khan, Special to the Post
Most people spent Independence Day weekend picnicking and watching fireworks.
Instead the Colts and 15 other teams spent the weekend participating in a cricket tournament in Plano, Texas, hosted by the Dallas Youth Cricket League.
The Colts are a youth team that has been playing in the Cricket League of New Jersey (CLNJ) for the past three years.
The team, comprised of boys ages 13-16 from across the state, participated in the U-16 tournament and returned home undefeated.
Six New Jersey teams participated in the U-16 age group.
Teams came to Texas from across the country, with teams from California, Georgia, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Missouri.
The Colts comfortably defeated teams from the Midwest, Texas, and southern California to reach the final, where the Colts played the home team and convincingly beat them to win the National Youth League championship.
Although cricket is not a mainstream sport in the United States, it was once the most popular sport in America.
The first ever-international cricket match was between the United States and Canada in 1844, making it the oldest international sporting rivalry in the world.
Cricket continued to gain popularity in the America’s early years, until the Civil War, where the war-torn nation found it difficult to find equipment and maintain pitches to be used for cricket and much easier to put down four bases on a given field.
By the 1870s, baseball had taken cricket’s place as the sport of the general public.
In 1965, the United States became an associate member of the International Cricket Council. Cricket has a strong base in the United States and is expected to grow in the next decade.
Six players on the team touring Plano, Advait Manur (Iselin), Amol Lotia(Mullica Hill), Harish Easwariah(North Brunswick), Humzah Khan(South Brunswick), Raymond Ramrattan(Jersey City), and Vivek Narayan (Princeton), also represented the Central Atlantic Region in a series of tournaments.
After a series of rigorous tryouts, the Central Atlantic Region a U-15 team went to Eastern Conference Championships in North Carolina, where they went undefeated.
Their streak continued at the National championships in northern California, until they lost in the final.
The Atlantic Region is currently preparing a U-17 team to participate in a similar tournament in New York in early August.
For more information, visit the home page of the Cricket League of New Jersey at http://www.dreamcricket.com/clnj/index.aspx.

