Lauderhill Cricket History and Match Records

Central Broward Park is a municipal recreation ground in Lauderhill, in the suburban sprawl north-west of Fort Lauderdale, with a walking trail, playgrounds, tennis and netball courts, artificial pitches that can be split into soccer or cricket configurations, and a floodlit stadium in the middle of it seating ten thousand people around a circular turf field about 167 yards across. Broward County opened it on 9 November 2007. The park cost around seventy million dollars.

For most of the following decade and a half it was the only place in the United States where a proper international cricket match could be played. Not the best place — the only place. New Zealand and Sri Lanka met here in 2010 in the first official fixture between two Full Members on American soil. The West Indies used it as an American home ground for a series of Twenty20 internationals against India, Bangladesh and others. The first one-day internationals ever staged in the country were played here. And in June 2024, when a World Cup finally came to the United States, this was the venue that spent most of the week under tarpaulins.

Both halves of that record belong in the same account. Lauderhill's history is the history of what a single well-built county stadium could carry, and of the one problem no amount of investment has solved.

What the county actually built

It is worth being precise about what this is, because the language around it is often loose. Lauderhill is not a cricket club's ground and not a franchise's stadium. It is a Broward County regional park, built by public money as public recreation, with cricket as the anchor tenant of its main stadium.

The stadium seats around ten thousand in permanent seating, with grass berms around part of the perimeter that can take a further fifteen thousand, giving a headline figure of twenty-five thousand when the site is fully used. It has floodlights, hospitality boxes, and two artificial-turf practice areas which convert between soccer, gridiron and cricket use. The surrounding park keeps working as a park on days when there is no cricket, which is the reason a county was willing to build it and the reason it has stayed maintained through years when the sport had almost no professional presence in the country.

The ground carries several names, which confuses scorecards. Cricket records generally list it as Central Broward Regional Park Stadium Turf Ground; the county and the city increasingly call the stadium itself Broward County Stadium; and locals say Lauderhill. They are the same field. Below the international level it has also carried a steady load of domestic cricket, including fixtures in the second-tier American professional competition, which is unglamorous work but the sort that keeps a square in use and a grounds crew employed between tours.

The design choice that matters most is the one people notice last. The playing area is a genuine circle of adequate diameter, not a rectangle with rounded corners. That is why it could be certified, and it is why nothing else in the United States could be for so long.

The first certification

The stadium was the first cricket venue in the United States to be certified by the ICC to host international matches. That single administrative fact determined the next fifteen years of American cricket scheduling.

Certification is not a courtesy. It covers the playing area, the square, drainage, floodlighting, player and match-official facilities, security and broadcast provision. A ground either meets the requirements or does not, and until Lauderhill did, any team that wanted to play an international in the United States had nowhere to play it. Once Lauderhill did, an entire category of fixture became possible — and, because there was no second certified venue, every one of those fixtures came here.

May 2010: two Full Members in Florida

The first came in the spring of 2010. New Zealand and Sri Lanka played two Twenty20 internationals at the ground on 22 and 23 May, and shared the series one apiece. It was the first time two Full Members of the ICC had met in an official match in the United States, which is a sentence worth pausing on: a country with organised cricket clubs dating back to the nineteenth century waited until 2010 for that.

The scheduling logic was straightforward and would be repeated many times. Two touring sides already in the Caribbean, a short hop north, and a metropolitan area with a large West Indian and South Asian population willing to buy tickets for a neutral fixture. The economics of that audience are examined in the guide to diaspora communities and American cricket.

The West Indies' American home ground

The pattern that followed made Lauderhill something unusual in world cricket: a home ground in a country that was not the home team's.

Cricket West Indies took a run of Twenty20 internationals to Florida across the following decade — against New Zealand in 2012, against India in 2016, 2019 and 2022, and against Bangladesh in 2018, each time as the last leg of a Caribbean tour. The commercial case was that a South Florida crowd would pay more for a ticket than a Caribbean one, and it broadly held.

Set out as a fixture list, the pattern is easy to read:

Series	Detail
New Zealand v Sri Lanka, May 2010	Two Twenty20 internationals, shared 1-1; the first Full Member fixture in the country
West Indies v New Zealand, July 2012	Twenty20 international, the first time the West Indies used the ground as a home venue
West Indies v India, August 2016	Two Twenty20 internationals; the West Indies won the first by one run, the second was washed out
West Indies v Bangladesh, August 2018	The closing Twenty20 internationals of a Caribbean tour
West Indies v India, August 2019	Two Twenty20 internationals, both won by India
West Indies v India, August 2022	Two Twenty20 internationals, both won by India

Six visiting series in a dozen years, five of them involving the West Indies as nominal hosts, is a decent return for a county park. It is also a reminder that almost none of this cricket involved an American team. Lauderhill spent its first decade as a rental property for other countries' fixtures.

Franchise cricket arrived too. In 2016 the Caribbean Premier League played its first matches on American soil here, six of them between 28 and 31 July, including the first fixture in Florida staged under floodlights — Guyana Amazon Warriors against Barbados Tridents on 28 July. For a competition whose whole business model depends on a diaspora television audience, extending into the United States was an obvious move, and Lauderhill was the only ground that allowed it. The Caribbean Premier League guide covers what that competition became.

The records

Because so much international cricket was concentrated on one ground, the venue records read like a small anthology of visiting talent rather than a local history.

Record	Detail
Highest individual score	KL Rahul, 110 not out from 51 balls, 27 August 2016
Only five-wicket haul	Zhivago Groenewald, 5 for 25 against the United States, 20 September 2019

Rahul's innings is the one people remember, and the result is the reason. He made 110 not out from 51 balls in a Twenty20 international against the West Indies and India still lost by one run. It remains the highest score made at the ground and one of the better one-run finishes in the format. Rahul's fuller record sits in the player index.

The first one-day internationals in the country

The other landmark came in September 2019, when Lauderhill hosted the first one-day internationals ever played in the United States, in a tri-nation series involving the American side, Papua New Guinea and Namibia under the new Cricket World Cup League 2 structure.

That is a smaller occasion than a Full Member fixture and a more consequential one for the host country. Those matches were part of the machinery that finally gave the United States a regular diet of ODI cricket, described in more detail in the USA World Cup qualification history. Groenewald's five-wicket return against the Americans came in that series.

Rain, and the reputation it earned

South Florida in the summer has a wet season, and the wet season means near-daily convective thunderstorms in the afternoon. Cricket schedulers keep discovering this.

It caught the ground early — the second of the two India fixtures in 2016 was washed out — and it caught the 2024 World Cup badly. Of four scheduled group matches at Lauderhill, three were abandoned without a ball bowled: the United States against Ireland on 14 June, India against Canada on 15 June, and Sri Lanka against Nepal. In two of those cases the rain had stopped by the time the players arrived and the problem was a saturated outfield rather than active weather, which is a drainage question as much as a meteorological one.

The one match that got on was Pakistan against Ireland on 16 June. Ireland made 106 for 9, Shaheen Shah Afridi taking 3 for 22 and Imad Wasim 3 for 8; Pakistan reached 111 for 7 with seven balls to spare, Babar Azam unbeaten on 32 and Shaheen finishing it with two sixes. It was a consolation win at the end of a tournament Pakistan had already lost, played in front of a ground that had spent the week waiting.

The abandonment that mattered most was the first one. The washout against Ireland gave the United States the shared point that put it into the Super 8 and eliminated Pakistan, which means the most significant thing that happened on this ground in 2024 was a match that never started. The full tournament account is in the guide to the 2024 T20 World Cup in the USA.

Rebuilt for the franchise era

Broward County did not treat the World Cup as an end point. A renovation programme worth around eight and a half million dollars was begun at the park before the tournament, within a wider spend on the site reported at over eleven million, covering expanded seating, improved training facilities and a media centre.

The return came quickly. The ground staged matches of the American professional Twenty20 competition for the first time in early July 2025, and the county has been open about the strategy: having spent public money to World Cup standard, use the asset for a recurring fixture list rather than wait for another tournament. How that competition works is set out in the guide to Major League Cricket, and Lauderhill's position among the country's grounds now that it has company is covered in the surveys of cricket grounds and stadiums in the USA and future cricket venues.

Visiting

The park is on NW 11th Place in Lauderhill, inland from Fort Lauderdale and reachable by car from either Fort Lauderdale or Miami. Like most American cricket venues it assumes you drive.

Two practical points. The first is the berm: on a day with temporary capacity in use, the grass banks are the cheapest and in some ways the best seats, and you bring your own shade. The second is the weather. If you are travelling for a July or August fixture, build a spare day into the trip, because the ground's own history says you may need it.

The contrast with the newer Texas venue — hard seating, a converted ballpark, a resident franchise, reliable weather — is instructive, and that ground is described in the Grand Prairie Stadium guide. The rest of the American game sits on the cricket in the USA hub.

Sources and method

Construction dates, cost, capacity and field dimensions come from Broward County and City of Lauderhill records and published venue documentation. ICC certification, international fixtures, results and venue records were checked against official scorecards and ICC material; the renovation figures follow county and city announcements. Capacity is given both as permanent seating and as the larger figure available with berm and temporary seating, because published totals differ depending on which is counted. The remarks about drainage and about the effect of the wet season on scheduling are descriptive readings of the venue's own match record rather than engineering assessments.