Cricket in California: Bay Area Leagues to LA28
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Cricket in the United States9 min read
California has more cricket than any other American state and no single cricket community. Drive the Sepulveda Basin in Van Nuys on a Sunday and you will find four grass grounds laid out in a flood-control park, Caribbean accents on the boundary, and clubs that have been playing each other since before anyone in the state had heard of a startup. Drive Highway 101 through Santa Clara County on the same afternoon and you will find a different game entirely: matting wickets on municipal fields, teams named after software companies, and a fixture list arranged around H-1B working hours.
The two scenes are roughly four hundred miles apart, they run separate league structures, and until professional cricket arrived they had almost nothing to do with each other. What connects them now is that both are inside the state that will host cricket's return to the Olympic Games, at a fairground in Pomona in the summer of 2028.
This page covers both halves — the older Southern Californian club game, the much larger Northern Californian league system, the two professional franchises the state supports, and what is actually being built for the Olympics.
The Sepulveda Basin and the four Woodley grounds
Los Angeles cricket is concentrated at one site, and its history is unusually well documented. In 1977 an active West Indian cricket community in the city obtained the use of land in the Sepulveda Basin, the enormous flood-control area behind the dam in the San Fernando Valley. Two grounds opened there in 1980, named the Clifford Severn and Ernie Wright fields. Two more followed in 1996, the Jean Wong and John Marder grounds, both named after former presidents of the Southern California Cricket Association.
The complex as a whole carries the name of Leo Magnus, known as Jingles, a Jamaican cricketer who played for the University Cricket Club in Los Angeles and coached both the Compton Cricket Club — originally the Los Angeles Krickets — and the Sheenaway Serendipity club. Naming a public sports facility after a Jamaican club coach tells you a good deal about who built cricket in Los Angeles and when.
Four adjacent grounds in one park is a rarity in the United States, where most club cricket is squeezed onto multi-use fields with artificial strips. It means Southern California can run a full weekend fixture card in one place, and it is why the Woodley complex appears on most lists of cricket grounds worth visiting in the USA.
The Bay Area's league system, and why it is so big
Northern Californian cricket works on a different model. The Northern California Cricket Association is the umbrella body for organised league cricket in the Bay Area and traces its origins to the 1890s, which makes it one of the older continuously named cricket organisations in the country. What it looks like today bears no relationship to its Victorian founding: dozens of clubs across multiple divisions, running weekend competitions in both hard-ball and tennis-ball formats, spread from the East Bay through the peninsula and down into the South Bay.
The Bay Area is the densest concentration of adult cricketers in the United States, and the reason is straightforward. Santa Clara County and the surrounding cities absorbed very large numbers of software engineers from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka from the 1990s onwards, and those arrivals brought a sport with them. It is the same mechanism visible in Seattle's cricket scene and in the Research Triangle, and it is the central explanation in the guide to diaspora communities and American cricket.
The practical consequence for a new player is that Northern California has more entry points than almost anywhere else in the country. Multiple leagues, multiple formats, and clubs actively recruiting. The mechanics of getting into one are covered in the guide to joining a cricket club.
Cupertino, and the state's youth pipeline
The most consequential thing built in Californian cricket this century is probably not a stadium. The California Cricket Academy, based in Cupertino, has been running coaching and youth league cricket since 2003 as a non-profit, with age-group competition from around six years old to seventeen, programmes across several Northern Californian cities, and a coaching structure that runs year round.
That matters because the standard problem in American cricket is not adult participation but continuity. Adults who grew up with the game will find a Sunday league anywhere; children born in the United States mostly will not encounter cricket at school, and without an organised junior structure they simply do not start. An academy that has been running age groups for two decades produces something rare in this country — American-raised cricketers who learned the game here rather than abroad. The national version of that problem is set out in the youth cricket pathway guide.
Two franchises, one state
California is the only state supporting two Major League Cricket teams, and their situations are not alike.
| Franchise | Base | Position |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco Unicorns | Bay Area | Reached the MLC final in 2024; played home matches at the Oakland Coliseum from 2025 |
| Los Angeles Knight Riders | Los Angeles area | Part of the Knight Riders ownership group, with a new ground developed in Pomona |
Beneath them sits the state's Minor League Cricket representation, most notably the Silicon Valley Strikers, based in the Bay Area with a home at the Morgan Hill Outdoor Sports Complex. The Strikers won the first Minor League Cricket championship in October 2021, and their early rosters read like a directory of American international cricket — Saurabh Netravalkar among them, with the former India Under-19 captain Unmukt Chand later leading the side. The tier system and what it is for are explained in the Minor League Cricket guide.
The franchise picture and its owners are set out in MLC teams and owners; the competition itself is explained in Major League Cricket explained.
The Oakland Coliseum experiment
In 2025 Major League Cricket did something no American cricket administrator had previously managed: it moved into a major-league baseball stadium and made it work for a whole season block. The San Francisco Unicorns played their home matches at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, a venue vacated by its baseball tenant, with nine matches staged there involving all six MLC sides.
It was, in the Unicorns' own framing, the first time the franchise had played in front of a Bay Area home crowd. In June 2025 they beat the Los Angeles Knight Riders there by 32 runs, making 219 for 8 and restricting the Knight Riders to 187 — a genuine California derby in a 1960s concrete bowl built for the Athletics and the Raiders.
The wider question the Coliseum raises is whether converted baseball stadiums are a bridge or a dead end for American cricket. The outfields are the wrong shape, the square has to be dropped in, and the atmosphere in a two-thirds-empty 40,000-seat venue is difficult. Against that, the alternative is building from scratch. That trade-off is examined in the guide to cricket in baseball stadiums.
Pomona: what the Olympics is actually building
Cricket returns to the Olympic programme at Los Angeles 2028, and the venue is not in Los Angeles. The LA28 organising committee selected Fairplex in Pomona, roughly fifty kilometres east of the city, a five-hundred-acre site that has hosted the Los Angeles County Fair since 1922. A purpose-built temporary cricket stadium is being constructed there.
The competition itself is small and deliberately so: six teams in the men's event and six in the women's, played as Twenty20, with ninety athlete quota places allocated across the sport, which works out at fifteen-player squads. The Games run from mid-July to the end of July 2028. It will be the first Olympic cricket since 1900, when Great Britain played France in Paris in a two-day match.
Pomona was not an obvious choice, and the practical reasons for it are worth understanding: an existing large site with parking and infrastructure, inland from the coastal traffic, in a part of Los Angeles County with an established South Asian population and an existing cricket presence. The Knight Riders franchise has also developed a ground in the city. The tournament format, qualification and what the Olympics may or may not do for the sport are covered in the guide to cricket at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
The engineer who bowled the super over
The clearest illustration of what Californian cricket is comes from a single career. Saurabh Netravalkar is a principal software engineer at Oracle, based on the San Francisco peninsula, and he has held that job since 2016. He is also the left-arm seamer who bowled the super over that beat Pakistan at the 2024 T20 World Cup.
His route was not the Californian club system — he was born in Mumbai, played Ranji Trophy cricket as a teenager, was India's leading wicket-taker at the 2010 Under-19 World Cup, and came to the United States in 2015 for a master's degree at Cornell. But the shape of his American cricket career is entirely Bay Area: a full-time technical job, weekend league cricket, and international appearances fitted around a work calendar.
That is the state's contribution to the national side in miniature, and it is also the ceiling. A country whose best bowler is holding down a demanding engineering job is a country without a professional pathway underneath its national team. Whether Major League Cricket changes that is the open question in the guide to the domestic player pathway.
Conditions, surfaces and the season
Californian cricket is played on three kinds of surface and the difference matters if you are turning up to play rather than to watch.
- Grass squares, of which the Woodley grounds are the state's best-known example. Rare, maintained by volunteer labour as much as by municipal budgets, and the closest thing here to the game as played elsewhere.
- Matting and artificial strips laid over municipal parkland, which is what most Bay Area league cricket is played on. They are consistent, low-bounce and unforgiving of anyone who expects lateral movement.
- Drop-in squares used for professional cricket in converted stadiums, prepared to a standard that has nothing in common with either of the above.
Weather is the state's real advantage. Coastal and inland Southern California can support cricket most of the year, and Northern Californian summers are reliably dry, which means fixtures are lost to heat and to smoke from wildfire seasons far more often than to rain. That is the reverse of the problem American cricket faces in Florida and the Northeast.
Watching and playing here
If you want to watch club cricket, the Sepulveda Basin grounds in Van Nuys and the Bay Area's league venues are open and free, and the season runs across the long Californian summer rather than the compressed spring-to-autumn window most of the country lives with. Southern California can play essentially year round.
If you want to watch professional cricket, the Major League Cricket season falls in the summer and the state has hosted both franchise home blocks and neutral fixtures. If you want to play, the entry route is a league club rather than a national pathway, and both ends of the state have clubs that will take a beginner on a Sunday.
For the wider structure this all sits inside — the leagues, the pathways, the money and the arguments about what American cricket is for — the cricket in the USA hub collects the rest of it.
Sources and method
This guide draws on Southern California Cricket Association and Los Angeles city records for the history and naming of the Woodley grounds, published Northern California Cricket Association material for the Bay Area league structure, the California Cricket Academy's own programme documentation, Major League Cricket and franchise announcements for the Oakland Coliseum season and match results, and LA28 and Olympic organising-committee releases for the Pomona venue, tournament size and athlete quota. Club and team counts in Californian league cricket change every season and are described here in general terms. Claims about the relative size of academies or leagues reflect what those organisations publish about themselves rather than an independent count. Nothing here is computed from our own datasets.