Introducing Cricket in US Schools System

Hello Readers,

This week I am writing from a Coaches perspective. Recently, Cricket Academy of USA (CAUSA) & Fulton County School System (Atlanta, Georgia, USA) embarked upon a Cricket development project. So far CAUSA has conducted 2 sessions for over 100 PE Teachers & both sessions have been a phenomenal success. The third session is scheduled on February 24th 2010.

Coaching in UK has left some unforgettable memories in my mind. In cricket playing nations, coaching beginners is comparatively easier as the participants have heard, seen, followed cricket on TV or read in Newspapers. They are not alien to cricket in any way. They know about the basic rules of cricket such as bowling, over, runs, etc, by default.

My experience of conducting this cricket development workshop with the PE teachers in Fulton county has been great. Most of these PE teachers have never heard of Cricket. Few teachers have heard about cricket somewhere & know that it's a British sport. During the second session, I showed them Yuvraj Singh's six sixes, they really enjoyed it & liked the fact that there is huge crowd & celebrations when something spectacular happens, just like in baseball. The teachers were curious to know how a batsman gets out, how many balls in an over, about running between the wickets. They really liked the communication part of running between the wickets - call of Yes, No or Wait between the batsmen. They got excited while doing the fielding & catching drills. Since they are all decent baseball players, they showed me a very easy, yet powerful & safe way of throwing. This is what many international cricket teams have started using, the baseball technique for throwing.

Some teachers were excited to know the various formats of Cricket. Some of them wanted to know about the pitch, questions about composition of a cricket team were interesting too.

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