These NJ standouts on the USA team are helping women's cricket find more fans

These NJ standouts on the USA team are helping women’s cricket find more fans

Posted by Admin October 2, 2024 Cricket

Disha Dhingra had no interest in playing cricket — that is until about four years ago when her father asked her to pick up a bat and he threw her a ball.

“‘Okay,'” Dhingra recalled her father, Rajat, a member of the Sayreville Gladiators Cricket Club, saying, “I want you to try it for two weeks.'”

“I still wasn’t really interested,” she said. “But I was like, ‘Okay, why not?’ I started to pick it up and I fell in love with it.”

Today, Dhingra, 17, who hails from Old Bridge in Middlesex County, plays for the USA Cricket women’s team. The team did not qualify for the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup, which starts on Thursday in the United Arab Emirates. But if it had, Dhingra and her teammates — unlike female athletes in most other sports — would be earning the same match pay as their male counterparts.

Women’s cricket has grown in stature, and it will be featured along with men’s cricket in the 2028 Olympics. The International Cricket Council (ICC), in 2021, found there were over 2 million female cricket players worldwide, and the number of women and girls playing the sport increased by 50% in a decade.

The fanbase for women’s cricket has also grown. The T20 Women’s World Cup 2021 had over a billion views across social media platforms.

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Its foothold in the world of sports is following in line with the ascendancy of women’s sports in the past 25 years, says B.J. Schecter, the executive director of the Center for Sports Media at Seton Hall University.

“The rise and popularity of women’s sports have gone on for some time. There have been some ebbs and flows, but when you look back to the 1999 Women’s [Soccer] World Cup and Brandi Chastain and the women’s national team filling the Rose Bowl and beating China in penalty kicks,” Schecter said. “We started seeing the rise of women’s sports. It’s carried over into not only into the Olympic sports but also basketball has seen the most tangible signs.”

With the growth of women’s cricket, the U.S. is becoming a hot market. The BBC reported in May that there have been talks to start a women’s T20 franchise tournament similar to the men’s Major League Cricket, which was played in July.

Women’s sports rising

Women’s basketball — both college and professional — has been the most visible example of women’s sports on the rise, said Schecter, a former sportswriter. Former University of Iowa basketball star Caitlyn Clark and LSU star Angel Reese are the visible faces of the WNBA both on the court and on social media.

Other women’s sports have also reaped the benefits of the rising popularity, he said, including women’s college softball, which often gets higher television ratings than men’s college baseball, and gymnastics with Olympic star Simone Biles and LSU standout Olivia Dunne.

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“I see women’s sports continuing on this upward trend that it has been on. There are more opportunities for female athletes, and it’s long overdue,” Schecter said. “I think with training and nutrition, female athletes are bigger, stronger, and faster, and that is only going to continue.”

Developing into stars

Dhingra is one of the USA cricket team’s rising young stars, coming a long way from hitting a ball in her basement. Another is Aditi Chudasama, also from New Jersey, who was named last week as the captain of the USA women’s cricket team.

Chudasama, 18, has been playing since she was 11 when she was part of the boys’ team at Dream Cricket Academy. Chudasama, a senior at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School, said that her heritage led her to the sport.

“I come from a South Asian family, so it’s pretty dominant in South Asian culture,” Chudasama said. “My family and other relatives would get together and often play it, and my parents are big cricket fans.”

Dhingra said she developed her hitting and fielding with coaching from her father and veteran Indian female cricketer Deepali Rokade, along with lessons at the Dream Cricket Academy in Somerset. She also honed her skills by playing matches across the state with a mainly boys’ team, made up of students at Dream Cricket. (She was only one of three girls enrolled there at the time). But since then, she has seen more young women take up the sport and the academy having more girls enrolled.

“When I first started playing, there weren’t many girls that were playing. Compared to now, there’s definitely more girls playing,” Dhingra said. “We have developmental pathways to make the USA team, and every year, you see tons more girls and more competition.”

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One example is USA Cricket, which hosted the Women’s Domestic Pathway Competition from May to July. Teams from across the country, including the NJ Lady Eagles — where Dhingra and Chudasama were teammates — played for a championship and served as a talent showcase. The two also played in the inaugural U19 (Under 19) World Cup in 2023.

Dhingra said even though the USA women’s team did not qualify for the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup, she plans to watch to catch some of her favorite players, such as India’s captain Harmanpreet Kaur and Australia’s captain Alyssa Healy.

And she has another reason for watching.

“I feel like a lot of girls and young people will be watching to see where some teams are at and things they can improve on,” said Dhingra, a 17-year-old Rutgers University-Newark freshman. “I feel one of the main things is definitely how they field … I also feel like fielding is one of the most important things in cricket, that’s definitely one thing that I am always looking to improve.”

But her reasons are not just personal. She believes that women’s cricket will grow in the U.S. and New Jersey in the coming years, and she’s pleased that both men’s and women’s cricket will be in the 2028 Olympics.

“I feel like right now we have one girls’ team that I feel like across all the [cricket] academies in New Jersey that’s going to grow,” Dhingra said. “I feel like they hopefully will make a whole all-girls league by itself. Girls team against girls team.”

Chudasama first played for various local and regional teams overseen by USA Cricket’s Domestic Pathway, and that process eventually brought her to the national team. Now, she is a bowler on the USA team.

She followed in the footsteps of her older brother and found herself becoming immersed in cricket, calling it a “seamless transition.”

“I never had to think about making cricket my first priority, it just happened for me pretty naturally,” Chudasama said.

She said playing over the past six years has given her a front-row seat to see more young women taking up the sport in the United States and even thinking of making it a career.

“I think because the USA is involved in so many important tournaments now, I think girls are seeing it as an opportunity to make cricket a profession rather than they can see on the sidelines,” Chudasama said.

Chudasama said when looking back at the past six years of developing into a top-flight cricketer, it has not just been a physical transformation.

“I was a very timid person when I started. I didn’t talk to many people. I think I have grown into myself a lot. I can talk to different people, and stand up for myself,” Chudasama said. “I think I just developed as a person, not just a cricketer.”

With the Women’s World Cup this week, she is looking forward to watching some of the world’s best women’s cricket players including her favorite Laura Wolvaardt, the captain of the South Africa team, and teams like India, South Africa, and Australia.

“I think it’s a really good sign that cricket is growing and is developing not just for the men’s but for the women’s as well,” Chudasama said. “I think it will be great all around for any cricketer who wants to take up the sport. It’s going to inspire a lot of people, motivate a lot of people, and I think the numbers are going to go up a lot more and the quality will go up.”

Ricardo Kaulessar covers race, immigration, and culture for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: kaulessar@northjersey.com

Twitter/X: @ricardokaul