USA Cricket launches new structure for domestic cricket

The competition will form the first step of the new domestic structure and will supplement the existing tournaments. The aim of this is to establish a clear pathway from the grassroots to the representative cricket.

“The new structure for women’s cricket in America is the culmination of a significant amount of work by many of those already involved in women’s cricket within the USA,” said Nadia Gruny, chair of the USA Women and Girls Committee.

“With the overall player pool still being relatively small, there is no doubt that we need to look at ways to expand the playing base and we felt that a critical first step was to establish a domestic structure with playing opportunities for women and girls at the local and national level.”

“The new three-tiered approach complements the privately organized competitions that already exist and will allow the best players to come through the system and follow a pathway towards playing representative cricket. We now have an exciting year for the women’s program after such a long time without any cricket and we have designed this new structure with our international playing commitments for the rest of the year in mind and believe that this will help give us great preparation, momentum and pride for representing the US, going into those tournaments.”

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Based on the performances in the intra-regional competition, teams will be picked to represent each of the north-east, south-east, south-west and west regions for a series of two T20s and two fifty-over matches in July. While the Senior National Championships will be played from August 2-8, the under-18 national championships will be held from August 11-13.

The Senior National Championships will consist of three T20s and three 50-over games while the under-19 competition will have four T20s.

“USA Cricket is proud to be able to launch a brand-new domestic playing structure for women’s cricket in the United States, with the objective being to create more playing opportunities for women and girls to play with and against each other,  as well as to establish a clear pathway for female players to  develop from grassroots cricket through to the National Women’s U19 and Senior teams,” said Iain Higgins, CEO of USA Cricket.

“We have placed particular importance in our Foundational Plan on women’s cricket over the next three years and we feel that this structure will help to add new playing opportunities into the calendar and allow us to begin building out the potential for the women’s game in a way that has never been done before.”

“Although the creation of a domestic playing structure is an important step forward, we recognize that there is a lot of additional work to do to be able to engage more women and girls at all levels of the sport and attract them into the sport in the first instance,” he concluded.