The 2022 Minor League Cricket season will begin on June 25 and conclude on August 28. This was confirmed by USA Cricket in January. Minor League Cricket is an American Twenty20 cricket developmental league for Major League Cricket. Its first season was completed in 2021 after it was postponed from a mid-to-late 2020 start due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It has 26 teams from four different regions. Here in this article, we talk about USA Minor League Cricket.
The league’s regional draft process and a run of preseason games got underway in late August and September, respectively. On June 4, 2021, the league’s draft got underway. The Silicon Valley Strikers won the Minor League Cricket’s inaugural season by defeating the New Jersey Stallions by a score of six wickets in the championship match.
Just before USA Cricket became the country’s new cricket regulatory body in November 2018, discussions of an American Twenty20 competition began. The American Cricket Enterprises (ACE) offer for a $1 billion investment encompassing the league and other initiatives benefiting the American national teams was accepted, USA Cricket announced in May 2021.
Following the end of the exhibition league, USA Cricket said that the inaugural Minor League Cricket season will begin in the spring of 2021. The season began on July 31, 2021, and ended on October 3, 2021, with the Silicon Valley Strikers defeating the New Jersey Stallions in the championship match by a margin of six wickets. The sanctioning body disclosed future plans to create women’s leagues.
Current Teams
Minor League Cricket employs privately owned franchises, in contrast to Major League Cricket. On August 15, 2020, American Cricket Enterprises (ACE) released the names of 24 teams and their owners. ACE added three additional teams on June 3, 2021. The teams are also a part of two “conferences,” each of which is divided into two “divisions.” This is made up of the Atlantic Conference, which is divided into the Eastern and Southern divisions, and the Pacific Conference, which is divided into the Western and Central sections.
The Chicago Tigers and the Atlanta Lightning will take the place of the Chicago Catchers and Atlanta Param Veers, respectively, for the 2022 season. The Austin Athletics and Irving Mustangs will now be known as the Lone Star Athletics and the Dallas Mustangs, respectively. Additionally, it was revealed that the Florida Beamers will not play in 2022 due to their hiatus for that year.
League Structure
During the league stage, teams in each level will play somewhere between 14 and 16 games. The top two teams from each division will proceed to the quarterfinals when the league stage is through, where the top team from each division will play the second-placed club from the other division of their conference in a best-of-three series. The semifinals will determine which team will represent each conference in the championship game. The following games will be standard knockout matchups. On September 20, 2021, Major League Cricket announced the playoffs’ official schedule and locations.
The Minor League Cricket’s debut season included the most prize money in American cricket history—a total of $250,000—ever.
2021 Minor League Cricket Season
The Silicon Valley Strikers won the competition by defeating the New Jersey Stallions by 6 wickets in the championship match, which was contested in Morrisville, North Carolina. Hammad Azam of the Golden State Grizzlies was named the series’ most valuable player.
Everyone is excited for the upcoming season as “The scale of ambition and vision in our partnership with Major League Cricket is beginning to bear truly tangible fruit with the start of Minor League Cricket this weekend. The benefits and developments for the wider cricket community will be multi-faceted with continued infrastructural progress and the addition of more than 200 Twenty20 matches to the calendar for American cricket,” said USA Cricket CEO Iain Higgins. “Most excitingly, the league will provide really significant opportunities and exposure for our young, homegrown cricketers to compete at a higher, nationwide level with mandatory youth spots guaranteed in all Minor League Cricket teams. Minor League Cricket provides a tremendous step forward towards achieving the vision of making cricket a mainstream sport in the United States as outlined in USA Cricket’s Foundational Plan.”
