Cricket is taking off in the Houston region

Growing up in Pakistan, Murtaza Hashwani could easily shop for cricket gear.

The sport is that country’s most popular, with enough recreational and amateur players to support a small store devoted to the sport every 10th of a mile, said Hashwani, 28, owner of the Best Cricket Store, which opened its second location in 2018 in Katy. 

Hashwani launched the first store in 2013 in the Chicago area, where he had found a community of cricket players while visiting family. But finding the bats, gloves and padding used in the sport was more difficult, Hashwani said. “People were playing, but they were ordering online from India, Pakistan. So I said, let’s open here. It’s a bigger market. The U.S. has bigger everything.”

Except interest in cricket. 

Around the world, it’s massively popular, with about a half-billion people tuning in to this year’s Cricket World Cup. (The tournament’s final between host India and Australia is being played Sunday.) In the United States, it’s not quite there. But in Houston, Hashwani said, he found a particularly propitious environment for the sport: The region’s famously diverse population and year-round playing weather have helped make the sport popular and related businesses profitable.

Hashwani, who has had other businesses in the area, says the Best Cricket Store had sales of about $4 million from 86,000 customers across the U.S. last year compared with $8,000 in its first full year of business in 2014. 

Meanwhile, cricket stadiums and fields have been built or planned in Prairie View, Pearland and The Woodlands, hosting practices and matches for the area’s busy recreational and professional leagues.

The cricket complex in Prairie View, which opened in 2018, bills itself as America’s largest, with six fields and a stadium over 86 acres. It’s the home field for Minor League Cricket’s Houston Hurricanes, which played its first official season in 2021. Last year, the complex hosted the Minor League Cricket youth tournament.  

Cricket even got a boost from Fort Bend County voters last month. 

County Judge KP George, who grew up playing cricket in India, recalls that there wasn’t much formal cricket infrastructure in the county southwest of Houston when he was elected its chief executive in 2018. In October, as this year’s election approached, George was promoting the county’s $153 million parks bond that included several million dollars for seven new cricket fields. 

“Cricket is not an Indian or Pakistani game,” George said. “It started in England. Where the English went, they all play cricket.” It is most popular in former British colonies such as Australia, Jamaica, India, Pakistan and South Africa. 

That includes the United States, in a way. Although sports historians argue about the exact lineage of “the great American pastime” — now popular around the world in its own right — there is a general agreement that baseball is at least a cousin of cricket, as both can trace their roots to a centuries-old British tradition of stick-and-ball sports.

Vinod Nair, founder and head coach of Katy’s NextGen Cricket Academy and Club, says most of the youths who train at the nonprofit academy hear about it through word of mouth, sometimes enrolling after a free coaching session. “Give cricket a try. That is the caption,” he explained. “As a coach, my only goal is to instill the interest in them. Once you do that, it becomes easy. They will find their own path.” Today, there are about 90 children playing cricket through the NextGen Academy, paying fees of $250-$300 per year. 

Most of the academy’s players are boys, Nair added, but nine or 10 are girls. Similarly, a majority of the world’s professional cricketers are men, but women’s cricket is growing in popularity and esteem: In 2023, the England & Wales Cricket Board ruled that women cricketers should be paid the same match fees as men. 

Nair says that he can see potential constraints on the sport’s growth, however. Houston’s cricket network is still relatively small. The sport can be dangerous, with hard balls bowled at high speed. Many immigrant parents would rather see their children prioritize education over sports, no matter how beloved. And it can be expensive, with some bats costing hundreds of dollars.

“Back home in India, we had the financial support from our parents, our ancestors. Here in this country, we have to work until we cannot walk,” Nair said. “So that’s a restriction — financial insecurity is there, actually.”

Still, like most observers, he expects cricket to continue its ascent in the Houston area. In a way, the story of cricket here is like that of the region: one of growth. In Fort Bend County, where the population has surged by more than 50% since 2010, George said it’s important to invest in facilities for upstarts such as cricket and pickleball, as well as the traditional parks, libraries, schools and roads. 

“I try to get ahead of the curve,” George said, using a metaphor a batsman might endorse, “rather than doing the catching.”