ICC to hold USA town hall meeting in Chicago

ICC chief executive David Richardson and head of global development Tim Anderson will lead a town hall meeting in Chicago on Saturday as part of the ICC's efforts to engage stakeholders and bring disparate factions together in the wake of USACA's suspension at the ICC annual conference in June.

Anderson was one of several ICC representatives who arrived in Chicago on Thursday night and said he hoped the meeting will encourage open dialogue. Richardson was expected to spend part of the meeting directly discussing the background to USACA's suspension and Anderson hoped a Q & A session between ICC staff and stakeholders may unlock solutions to some of the problems that have plagued US cricket in recent years.

"The key focus for us for the day is that we're looking to kick off the strategy development process and we want to talk to the stakeholders and leagues about what they think are the most important cricketing aspects of the game in this country moving forward," Anderson told ESPNcricinfo on Thursday. Prior to the meeting, the ICC sent out a survey to select stakeholders last week to find out what areas of concern were the highest priorities for them, ranking a list of wide-ranging topics from lowest to highest in terms of importance. The survey data will be used for discussion sessions during the meeting.

"They are relatively simple questions around areas of key interest within US cricket, cricket related issues and trying to get a sense from the community as to priorities and perhaps why some things have worked and why some things haven't," Anderson said. "Junior development, women's cricket, fundraising, performance of teams are all key issues and we're trying to get an understanding of what the community feels about all of those things."

Anderson said that 80 leagues from around the country had received direct invitations to participate in the meeting, which will take place beginning at 9:30 am at the Hyatt Regency Hotel at O'Hare International Airport in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont. He said although the ICC expected most of the attendees to be league representatives, the meeting was open to all cricket stakeholders and anyone was encouraged to come and participate in the various dialogues taking place throughout the day.

"One of the key things that we want to be as much as possible during this whole process and during the day on Saturday is as open and transparent as we can be," Anderson said. "Even though we invited some specific people, it's actually an open meeting. Anyone can come but we invited the people that we really wanted to be there, the league representatives. In terms of the stakeholders we thought were most important, the leagues we thought were most important so the large majority of invitations were sent to the leagues.

"The political affiliations within the US cricket system aren't of interest to us in this process. We've invited leagues aligned to USACA, aligned ACF, aligned to both and neither. So we anticipate a really diverse spread of people to attend. Our local advisory group will also attend and at this point we anticipate 70 or 80 people to attend. If we are able to get 70-80 people in the room from a wide diverse landscape of US cricket, we think that would be a really positive thing."

For anyone unable to attend Saturday's town hall meeting, Anderson said that he did not envision this to be the last opportunity for stakeholders to interact with the ICC staff or the ICC's local advisory group during the strategy development process.

"We obviously got a good sense during the review group process that domestic cricket in the USA is very disconnected and we want to try to help the community rectify that situation," Anderson said. "We might open the survey up again after the meeting to a wider group of people to get their feedback as well. We want to try to connect with as many people as we can."