General elections continue to be delayed, as USA Cricket witnesses shades of USACA-era disorder

USA Cricket's general elections continue to be delayed, as the governance issues that plagued cricket in the US during the USACA-era rear their head again. USA Cricket has been in charge for less than four years but already elections that were supposed to happen no later than December 2020 have been delayed until at least March 2022. They could be delayed even further beyond that.

USA Cricket issued an election update earlier this month, putting out membership eligibility lists showing a total of 12,732 members. It is a significant increase from the 723 members USA Cricket had registered for the most recent election, in February 2020, but far below the "approximately 20,000" claimed by board chairman Paraag Marathe and then-CEO Iain Higgins during the May 2021 AGM.

The eligibility of those 12,009 additional members remains up in the air because of a legal action filed by USA Cricket board members Venu Pisike and Srini Salver over the legality of voting rights for new members. The pair's lawsuit was initially dismissed in the summer of 2021 on procedural grounds. However, the lawsuit has since been refiled and is currently pending in the court system.

Former USA Cricket board member Atul Rai, who served as league director from 2018 until 2020, but is now running as one of four candidates for the club director role currently held by Ajith Bhaskar, has called on the members of the board whose terms were supposed to end in 2020 to "resign with immediate effect and not participate in any further USA Cricket related meetings". Specifically, Rai's demand is targeted at three board members: Bhaskar, individual director Suraj Viswanathan, and female elite player director Nadia Gruny. In the absence of elections taking place, all three have continued to serve on the board for more than a year beyond their scheduled terms.

One point of contention relates to the club voting eligibility lists announced by the board. According to its own data, USA Cricket has declared eligible 397 clubs, which meet the constitutional threshold of 12 members per club to be eligible to have a club vote. However, ESPNcricinfo's own review of the membership data indicates that there are 542 clubs that meet the 12-member-per-club threshold. USA Cricket's club eligibility lists make no mention about the club voting status of five leagues - Colorado Cricket League, Commonwealth Cricket League (NY), Kerala Cricket League (NY), NY Bangladeshi Cricket League, and New York Tennis Ball Cricket League - that collectively have 89 voting eligible clubs as part of 1462 legitimately registered members.

Separate to this, the election voting membership data reflects the shifting patterns of cricket growth around the USA. Ahead of USA Cricket's first elections in 2018, the Midwest Cricket Conference was the largest affiliated member league with more than 400 players registered among the approximately 5500 members. However, USA Cricket's most recently published data shows that the league with both the most clubs and largest individual membership base in the country is now North Carolina's Triangle Cricket League. The TCL has 1153 members registered with USA Cricket, including 53 voting eligible clubs and 137 total clubs.

Those numbers help explain why USA Cricket and their commercial partner American Cricket Enterprises (ACE) in conjunction with Major League Cricket announced plans in February for a multi-million dollar investment upgrade toward TCL's Church Street Park. The facility is located in Morrisville, a suburb of the state capital Raleigh, and has previously hosted ICC Americas Regional Qualifier in 2018 as well as the tournament finals for the inaugural season of the Minor League Cricket T20 franchise tournament.

The upgrades for Church Street Park include adding 2000 permanent seats to open up total capacity to at least 3500 people, practice net facilities and TV broadcast facilities. The upgrades are primarily intended to make the facility more suitable to host matches for the 2024 ICC Men's T20 World Cup. The ICC announced in November that USA and West Indies had been awarded co-hosting rights for the event.