During its first official game on Sunday Feb. 25, the Viper cricket team marked the start of the season after a solid six months of training. Captain and junior Ayaan Anand established the team at the beginning of this school year with help from contacts from his club cricket team.
“I was looking over college cricket and realized that there’s this big club event that happens every year,” Anand said. “I talked to my coach about it and [he] said that on the internal level, I could start a team at my school. I saw this as something I could do, because I love cricket and [wanted] to share that love with my friends and other people in my school.”
Viper cricket is technically a private organization currently, because they students were unable to form it as an official school club. While they aren’t officially endorsed by Vandegrift High School, they still represent the school in their games around Austin.
“I really enjoy cricket,” junior Daniyal Zafar said. “I grew up watching the sport, and I played organized cricket in middle school. I thought this would be a good opportunity, because I didn’t think that cricket really existed in the United States.”
The team practices three times every two weeks with each practice designated to a specific purpose, including fielding, batting and fitness. Practices are held at the Vandegrift and Canyon Ridge Middle School fields, as well as Towne Square Park located in Steiner Ranch.
“The team environment is very friendly,” senior Vishnu Banda said. “I look forward to practices because, not only are we improving, we’re also having a lot of fun. I like that our cricket team has [become] a social circle that you can hang out with [off of] the field.”
Banda is the vice-captain of the team, but is temporarily serving as the captain on the pitch, since Anand is out with an injury. He holds more of an on-field role during games as well as schedules practices with the club managers and coaches. Both Coach Shaw and Natrajan Ekambram, a volunteer from Steiner Ranch, coach the team periodically.
“We only have a coach about half the time,” Anand said. “[When] it’s student run, the senior players, like Banda and I, coach rather than play at practices so that everyone knows what they’re doing. That way we can build everyone up as better players.”
According to Banda, at the beginning of the year, there were only a few members who had prior experience playing cricket. Utilizing Anand’s expertise and Banda’s mastery from when he played professionally in India, they started from scratch. They taught the players how to hold the bat, how to catch and other basic rules of cricket.
“I think we’ve improved a lot actually,” Anand said. “We started out as a bunch of people who didn’t know what we were doing, [and] now everyone has an idea of how the game works. There’s people like Louis Davies and Arthur Grousset that didn’t even know what cricket was when they joined. Now, they’re pretty much our starters because of how good they play.”
In addition to their rigorous practices, the team holds friendlies, or scrimmages, on weekends. Since the start of the school year, they’ve played several of these practice matches against the Westlake and Westwood teams, but the first official match was against Westlake on Feb. 25.
“We’ve all put in our best effort during practices so that we can prepare well for upcoming games and show our best on the field,” Zafar said. “Our recent practice looked really promising.”
“I think we deserve to win,” Banda said. “We might not have each and every player as the best people in the league, but I guarantee you that each and every person has worked the hardest in this league.”
And win they did – Vandegrift ended with 71 runs and four people out, while Westlake had 67 runs and six people out. While the team is focusing on winning all matches in the Austin High School Cricket League, they hope to organize a state championship next year, as Dallas has its own cricket league. They also envision expansion of the sport beyond Vandegrift.
“In India, it’s already such a well known sport, but over here, it’s a sport that we’re trying to grow,” Banda said. “Cricket in schools might be the start of something new. We’re just trying to make it big.”
