Cricket in Florida: Lauderhill and the Caribbean Game
Written and checked by CricketTakenPublished Cricket in the United States9 min read
Broward County opened a cricket stadium in November 2007. Not a multi-use park with a strip laid across it, and not a converted baseball ground — a stadium, with a turf square, permanent seating and grass berms behind it, built at a reported construction cost in the region of seventy million dollars as part of a larger regional park in Lauderhill. It remains the only purpose-built international cricket ground in the United States, and nearly two decades later nothing comparable has been completed anywhere else in the country.
The decision looks visionary in retrospect and it was not visionary at the time. It was demographic. Broward and Miami-Dade counties contain one of the largest Caribbean populations in the United States, and in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana and Barbados cricket is not a heritage activity but the sport. A county government in South Florida building a cricket ground in 2007 was responding to residents, not speculating about a future market.
That single fact separates Florida from every other American cricket region. Elsewhere the game arrived with software engineers from South Asia. Here it arrived, much earlier, with West Indians, and the accent of Florida cricket has stayed Caribbean ever since.
A Caribbean scene, not a South Asian one
Organised league cricket in the region long predates the stadium. The South Florida Cricket Alliance has been running competition in the area since 1974, as a Florida non-profit and an affiliate of the national governing body, and its clubs were built by Caribbean migrants who arrived through Miami rather than through technology hiring.
The consequences show up in small ways that a visitor notices immediately. The batting is more attacking than in Bay Area or New Jersey league cricket. Fast bowling is taken more seriously and there is more of it. The music on the boundary is soca and dancehall. The strongest supporter turnout at any professional fixture in Florida is for West Indian players. For the broader mechanics of how immigrant communities carry the sport into American cities, see the guide to diaspora communities and cricket; for where the Caribbean game itself came from, see the origins of cricket in the West Indies.
What Broward County actually built
The Lauderhill venue — variously called Central Broward Regional Park Stadium and Broward County Stadium — opened on 9 November 2007. The playing area is a genuine turf ground. The seating combines a permanent stand with large grass banks, and published capacity figures differ depending on whether temporary seating and the berms are counted, which is why numbers in the low tens of thousands and numbers around five thousand both appear in print.
Its first international came on 22 May 2010, when New Zealand played Sri Lanka in a Twenty20 international — two touring sides using an American ground as a neutral venue, which set the pattern for the following decade. The venue's own detailed record, including the matches and tournaments it has staged, is set out in the guide to Lauderhill's cricket history. Its place among the country's grounds is covered in cricket grounds and stadiums in the USA.
The West Indies' American home fixture
The most commercially successful cricket ever played in the United States, before Major League Cricket existed, was West Indies cricket in Lauderhill. Cricket West Indies has repeatedly used the ground as a home venue, most visibly for Twenty20 internationals against India in the 2020s, and the logic is simple: a Florida crowd for a West Indies-India fixture is larger and better paying than the equivalent crowd in the Caribbean, and the travel is easier for both boards.
This arrangement is unusual in world sport. A Test nation treating a foreign county's municipal stadium as a home ground, for revenue reasons, with the sanctioning body's approval, is close to unique. It also meant that for years the highest standard of cricket played on American soil had nothing to do with American teams or players — a point that recurs in the guide to the economics of American cricket.
June 2024, and what the rain exposed
When the men's T20 World Cup came to the United States, Lauderhill was one of the venues. It was also the venue that broke.
South Florida in June is in its wet season, with sustained afternoon thunderstorms and standing water that a park outfield struggles to shed. Two matches in the Florida leg were abandoned without a ball being bowled: India against Canada, and the United States against Ireland. The second of those had consequences well beyond Florida, sending the hosts into the Super Eights and eliminating both Ireland and Pakistan — a story told in the guide to the USA-Ireland fixture and in the account of the 2024 T20 World Cup in the USA.
The lesson taken from it was not that Florida is unsuitable for cricket. It is that a ground scheduled for June needs drainage, covers and reserve days appropriate to a subtropical wet season, and that Lauderhill's were not. That is an infrastructure problem with a known solution, and it is a cheaper problem to fix than building a stadium from nothing.
Major League Cricket comes to Broward
In July 2025 the professional league arrived. Broward County Stadium hosted a block of Major League Cricket fixtures — nine matches across six days at the start of the month, including a game on Independence Day — the first time the competition had played in Florida.
That mattered for two reasons. It gave the state a share of the top domestic tier alongside Texas and California, and it put professional cricket in front of the one American audience that already had a deep cricket habit. The structure of the competition and how the Florida block fits into its season are explained in Major League Cricket explained.
Outside Broward: Orlando, Tampa and the Treasure Coast
Florida cricket is not only a South Florida phenomenon, and the leagues further north are where most of the state's actual participation sits.
| Area | Structure |
|---|---|
| Broward, Miami-Dade, Miramar | South Florida Cricket Alliance, operating since 1974 |
| Orlando and central Florida | Central Florida Cricket League, with clubs including sides based around Maitland and Sanford |
| Palm Beach and the Treasure Coast | Local league cricket organised from West Palm Beach since the late 2000s |
The semi-professional tier reaches the state too. Minor League Cricket has fielded Florida franchises including the Orlando Galaxy and a Fort Lauderdale side, giving players in the state a competitive step above weekend club cricket without relocating. What that tier is for, and how a club cricketer gets into it, is covered in the Minor League Cricket guide.
Central Florida's growth has a different driver from the south. Orlando's population increase since the 2000s has drawn in South Asian as well as Caribbean arrivals, so the league cricket there looks more like the national pattern — a mixed playing population, tennis-ball and hard-ball competitions running side by side, and clubs formed around workplaces and neighbourhoods.
The state's contribution to the national side
Florida has produced more American-born international cricketers than its population share would suggest, and the clearest example is Steven Taylor.
Taylor was born in South Florida in November 1993 to Jamaican parents, came into the national set-up as a teenager and made his senior debut at sixteen, which puts him among the youngest men ever to represent the United States. A left-handed opener who also bowled off spin and kept wicket early on, he became the first American to score a Twenty20 century, making 101 from 62 balls against Bermuda in March 2013. He was later bought by a Caribbean Premier League franchise, which at the time made him the most highly paid American franchise cricketer.
The route he took is worth noting because it is the Florida route rather than the national one. He did not come through a school programme or an academy pipeline; he came out of Caribbean-Floridian club cricket, was identified young, and learned the professional game in the West Indies. Several other Americans of Caribbean descent have followed similar paths, and the Jamaican and Guyanese franchise systems have functioned as an informal finishing school for Florida players in a way that no American structure yet does.
That dependence is diminishing as the domestic professional tiers grow, but it explains why Florida's players have historically looked more like Caribbean cricketers in style and technique than like the products of Bay Area or Texan league cricket.
What the game is played on here
Two very different surfaces exist in the state, and the gap between them is wider than in most American cricket regions.
Lauderhill has a genuine turf square, prepared for international and franchise cricket, on Bermuda-grass outfields that hold up well in heat but shed water slowly. Almost everything else in Florida is played on artificial or matting strips laid over municipal parkland, often shared with soccer or football, which produces low, even bounce and rewards the batter who plays straight.
Two features of the climate shape play more than the surface does. The first is humidity, which affects the ball and the players in roughly equal measure — a spell of four overs in Miami in August is harder work than eight in Seattle. The second is the storm pattern: convective thunderstorms build in the afternoon, arrive fast, drop a great deal of water in twenty minutes and pass. Clubs schedule around it by starting early, and the better grounds have learned to keep covers on hand for a square that may need them twice in a day.
Playing and watching here
Florida's season is the longest in the country. There is no winter to stop play, which means league cricket runs in months when clubs in Chicago or New Jersey are indoors, and the practical constraint is heat and afternoon storms rather than frost. Fixtures start early, and a two-hour rain delay is a normal Sunday rather than a disaster.
For a visitor, Lauderhill is the destination: it is the only place in the United States where you can watch international or franchise cricket in a stadium designed for it, and tickets for anything short of a marquee fixture are easy to get. For a player, the entry point is a league club, and South Florida clubs are used to newcomers because the population is transient by nature.
Florida's role in the national picture is a specific one. It has the venue, the oldest continuous league cricket culture of any American cricket region, and the least South Asian playing population — and the way it fits alongside the tech-belt states is one of the threads running through the cricket in the USA hub. The nearest comparable Southern scene, built on an entirely different community, is described in the guide to cricket in Georgia.
Sources and method
This guide uses Broward County and City of Lauderhill facility records for the stadium's opening and construction, published international match records for the 2010 New Zealand-Sri Lanka fixture and the 2024 men's T20 World Cup abandonments, Major League Cricket and county announcements for the 2025 Florida fixture block, and the South Florida Cricket Alliance's and Central Florida Cricket League's own published material for league structure and founding dates. Stadium capacity is deliberately described as a range because official and press figures differ according to whether berm and temporary seating are included. Club and team counts change every season and are given generally. Nothing on this page is computed from our own datasets.