Cricket in Seattle: Eastside Leagues and the Orcas

Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, is part of the ownership group of a professional cricket team in Seattle. So are several other senior figures from the region's technology industry. The team, the Seattle Orcas, reached the final of Major League Cricket in its first season in 2023. The city also has a semi-professional side that won a national championship in 2022.

What the Seattle area does not have, and has not had since the idea was first approved, is a cricket ground built for the purpose. Twenty acres at Marymoor Park in Redmond were the subject of a King County Council motion of support in February 2022, construction was expected to start the following year, and the discussions were still discussions two years later. Cricket in the Puget Sound region is played, meanwhile, on park fields on the eastern side of Lake Washington.

This is the most concentrated version of a pattern visible across American cricket: money and interest arriving faster than concrete.

Why the Eastside

Seattle cricket is not really Seattle cricket. It is Eastside cricket — Redmond, Bellevue, Sammamish, Issaquah, Kirkland — the suburbs across the lake where Microsoft, Amazon and the region's other large technology employers have drawn tens of thousands of engineers, a substantial share of them from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, since the 1990s.

The geography is unusually tight. Unlike the sprawl of Dallas or Atlanta, the Eastside cricket population sits inside a compact set of adjoining cities with shared park systems and a single county government, which is why a proposal for one large facility made sense here and why three municipalities plus the county could all be brought behind it. The general mechanism by which technology employment created American cricket regions is set out in the guide to diaspora communities and the sport, and the nearest comparable case is the Bay Area, described in the guide to cricket in California.

What distinguishes Seattle from the Bay Area is scale and weather. There are fewer players, and the season is shorter and wetter than almost any other American cricket region's.

Klahanie and Marymoor: where the cricket actually happens

Two grounds carry most of the region's serious cricket. Klahanie Park, in the Klahanie area near Issaquah, and Marymoor Park in Redmond both host league and franchise fixtures, and both are municipal or county parkland rather than dedicated cricket facilities.

Marymoor is the more significant of the two, and not only because of what has been proposed there. It is a large county park with the space a cricket ground actually needs, in the middle of the region's cricket population, with road access and parking — which is why it was identified as the site for a facility that could host Major League Cricket, the United States national team and, at the time the proposal was made, matches at the 2024 men's T20 World Cup.

None of that happened. The World Cup went to Texas, Florida and Long Island; the twenty acres remain a proposal. The national inventory of grounds and how the Seattle venues compare is set out in cricket grounds and stadiums in the USA, and the pipeline of what may yet be built is covered in future cricket venues.

The Thunderbolts, and a national title in 2022

The Seattle Thunderbolts entered Minor League Cricket in 2021 as one of three expansion sides, owned by a local group with Phani Chitneni, Vijay Beniwal and Salman Taj among its principals. The first season was ordinary — an even record, fourth in the division, no finals. The second was not: the Thunderbolts won the 2022 championship.

The squad has been built around a small number of high-quality performers rather than depth. Andries Gous, the wicketkeeper-batter who has become one of the more destructive players in American cricket, is the franchise's leading run-scorer; Shadley van Schalkwyk its leading wicket-taker. Gous is the same batter who made 65 not out in the partnership that opened the 2024 T20 World Cup with a win over Canada, a match described in the guide to the USA-Canada rivalry.

A championship won by a side playing on county parkland is worth noting, because it undercuts the assumption that facilities determine results in American cricket. What the tier is and how it feeds the professional game is explained in the Minor League Cricket guide.

The Orcas, and what technology money bought

The Seattle Orcas were founded in 2023 as one of the six original Major League Cricket franchises. The ownership group is the most striking in the competition: Satya Nadella of Microsoft, the former Microsoft executive S. Somasegar, Samir Bodas, Ashok Krishnamurthi and Sanjay Parthasarathy, alongside the Indian infrastructure conglomerate GMR Group, which also holds cricket franchise interests elsewhere.

The name was chosen deliberately for local resonance rather than cricket branding, which is a small but revealing decision: the franchise was pitched at Seattle as a city, not only at Seattle's cricket community.

On the field the record has been uneven. The Orcas reached the final in the inaugural 2023 season and lost it to MI New York. The following seasons were considerably harder, with the side finishing at or near the bottom of the table before recovering to mid-table. Squads have been built around recognisable international names, and recent rosters have included the Australian all-rounder Marcus Stoinis as captain, the West Indian batter Shimron Hetmyer, the New Zealand wicketkeeper Tim Seifert, the South African seamers Lungi Ngidi and Ottniel Baartman, and the Sri Lankan all-rounder Dasun Shanaka.

The ownership picture across the league, and what these groups are actually buying, is set out in MLC teams and owners and Major League Cricket explained.

The problem of a home franchise with no home

Because Marymoor was never built, the Orcas have been a franchise without a stadium in their own market, playing their cricket at the league's venues in Texas, North Carolina, California and Florida.

The commercial cost of that is obvious. A team cannot build a local habit if local supporters cannot attend, and cricket's American audience is being asked to adopt a sport it may not know while also travelling two thousand miles to watch it. Merchandise, membership, junior affiliation and matchday revenue all depend on a ground.

There is a less obvious cost too. A franchise with a home venue becomes the region's cricket centre — practice facilities, coaching, junior programmes and community events attach to the building. Without one, the professional team and the local cricket community remain two separate things that happen to share a name. That relationship between venues and revenue is examined in the guide to the economics of American cricket.

Rain, and the shortest serious season in American cricket

Seattle's climate is the constraint that shapes everything else.

The Puget Sound region gets much of its rain across the autumn, winter and spring, with a reliably dry stretch through July, August and early September. That is close to the reverse of the Florida problem — the water arrives outside the cricket season rather than during it — but the effect on the calendar is severe. The usable window for outdoor cricket is short, wet outfields limit early and late-season play, and grounds on public parkland cannot be protected in the way a club-owned square could be.

Constraint	Effect on Seattle cricket
Long wet season	Playing window compressed into high summer
No dedicated ground	No turf square, no protected outfield, no clubhouse base
Compact geography	Easy travel between fixtures, cooperative municipalities
Concentrated tech population	Strong adult participation and unusual access to capital
No franchise home venue	Professional team disconnected from local audience

The combination is genuinely unusual: a region with the money to build cricket infrastructure, the political goodwill to permit it, the players to fill it, and no building.

What the region does get right

It would be easy to read Seattle as a failure, and that would be wrong. Two things here work better than in most American cricket regions.

The first is municipal cooperation. Getting three adjoining cities and a county government behind a single cricket proposal is genuinely hard, and it happened. Most American cricket communities cannot get one parks department to return a phone call, let alone secure a council motion naming their sport as a candidate for twenty acres of public land. The proposal has stalled, but the political groundwork exists in a way it does not elsewhere, which means the project can be revived rather than restarted.

The second is proximity. A cricketer on the Eastside can reach every ground, every club and every opponent inside half an hour. That sounds trivial next to stadiums and franchises, and it is not: travel time is the single biggest predictor of whether an amateur cricketer keeps playing after their second season. Chicago and Atlanta players routinely drive an hour each way for a fixture. Seattle players do not, and the retention that follows from that is why a small playing population sustains a competitive league.

The winter, and what fills it

Between October and April there is very little outdoor cricket in the Puget Sound region, and what a cricket community does with those six months determines how much it improves.

The options are limited and expensive. Hired indoor space — school gymnasiums, warehouse units, indoor sports centres — allows net practice with a soft or restricted-flight ball, but it does not allow anything resembling a match, and the cost per hour is high enough that most clubs ration it. Some players travel; a few use the winter to work on fitness rather than technique; most simply stop.

The consequence is a competitive standard that peaks in August and resets each spring. Bowlers spend the first month of every season rebuilding rhythm they lost in November. Young players lose more ground than adults do, because they are still learning rather than maintaining.

This is the strongest practical argument for the Marymoor facility, and it is rarely the one made publicly. A dedicated ground with covered nets and an indoor hall would extend the Seattle cricket year by several months, and that would do more for the region's players than any number of televised franchise fixtures played two thousand miles away.

Playing and watching here

For anyone wanting to play, the Eastside is a straightforward place to start. League cricket runs through the summer on the park grounds, clubs recruit continuously because the population turns over with the technology industry, and the geography means a fixture is rarely more than a short drive away. Expect artificial or matting surfaces, permit-bound start times, and a season that ends early. The practical steps are in the guide to joining a cricket club.

For a spectator, the honest answer is that Seattle offers less than its franchise's profile suggests. Minor League Cricket fixtures at Klahanie and Marymoor are the region's best regular cricket, and they are free or nearly so. Watching the Orcas has generally meant watching a broadcast.

The city is a good case study in what the next decade of American cricket turns on: not interest, not investment, but whether the grounds get built. The rest of that argument, region by region, sits on the cricket in the USA hub.

Sources and method

This page draws on King County Council records for the February 2022 motion of support and the proposed Marymoor facility, published Minor League Cricket season records for the Seattle Thunderbolts' 2022 championship and their leading players, Major League Cricket franchise announcements for the Orcas' ownership group and squad composition, and league season records for the 2023 final. The Marymoor cricket facility is described as proposed and unbuilt because no completed purpose-built ground exists there; existing cricket at Marymoor and Klahanie takes place on public park fields. Squad lists change every season and are given as recent examples rather than a current roster. Nothing here is computed from our own datasets.