I worked on a lot of episodes of The Broadside this year that felt important, or surprising, or meaningful, but my favorite one has to be “The surprising cricket capital of the South”, which tells the story of how a small cricket park in Morrisville became an international hub for professional-level cricket.

It’s about the journey of a community that made a home for its favorite pastime in their new home. And it’s about my community, Pakistani and other South Asian Americans, finding local support for this sport that slowly built to a point where it grabbed national and then international acclaim. I even got to talk about Lagaan, a movie about cricket and colonialism that’s unequivocally the best underdog sports movie of all time.

But this isn’t just a real-world example of a scrappy group of small town underdog athletes achieving their biggest dreams. It also evokes a place: The proximity to the airport with planes flying overhead every five minutes underscoring the rapid growth and development of this part of North Carolina; the details about them having to import a specific kind of black clay despite the ground being absolutely full of red Piedmont clay; the lack of an NCAA program for young cricket players who aspire to go pro in a state that is so deeply steeped in the culture of college sports.

And on a personal level, it was lovely to work on a story about my community for the first time that didn’t have to do with racism or trauma, and doesn’t fall back into tired tropes about Indians and Pakistanis hating each other. Instead we got to see a supportive intergenerational culture of mentorship and love for cricket – and an intense rivalry, of course. But that’s North Carolina too.