Youth cricket in San Diego began in 2013 when Rajinder Singh Ghai, Gangaram Singh, Jimmy Anklesaria, and Wayne Copeland of the San Diego Cricket Club generously volunteered their time and energy to impart cricket lessons to a group of young, motivated children looking for opportunities to play the game they loved. Saturday afternoons would see these gentlemen at the Canyonside Field or the SDCC Nets, teaching the eager tyros the basics of the game. The Club is also indebted to its earliest parent volunteers – Bala Chintamneedi & Ciji Anand in particular – who kept a structure around our early program that helped to fuel its subsequent growth.
As word got around and more kids turned up, more parent volunteers started stepping in. Training sessions became twice a week affair. By 2015, we had a full-time Coach in Akshay Brahmbhatt and were playing matches against a club from Orange County. By 2016, our players were participating in tournaments at Northern California and Orange County, we had formed a Southern California Youth Cricket League with SCYCA and SCCAY, and we had our representation at ICC Americas national youth conference. 2017 marked a major milestone in the organization of the club when it was formally affiliated under the constitution of SDCC, and a 5-member Executive Committee headed by Bala Chintamneedi was instituted from among the parent members to run the club’s administration.
The club has since grown from strength to strength as enrollment increased, training hours, facilities and resources increased, participation in national level tournaments increased, team and individual achievements kept a steady upward trajectory, relations with youth cricket clubs across the country were established and strengthened, older players graduated to play in senior leagues such as SCCA division games and San Diego Cricket Association’s T20 leagues, and the organization became stronger with elected Executive Committees serving 1 year terms under a participatory democratic process with the support of SDCC, especially of members like Raj Ghai, Ganga, Jimmy, and Sanjit Menezes.