Cricket space coming to Felida as sport gains fans

Even while pro basketball and World Cup football (aka soccer) tournaments have absorbed the attention of sports lovers across the nation and around the globe, a different game is gaining popularity and real estate here in Clark County: cricket.

Construction is nearly finished on Clark County’s first public cricket practice pitch, which has been installed at the north end of Felida Community Park, off Northwest 127th Street. A similar practice pitch will be installed in 2027 or 2028 at Pacific Community Park, Clark County Parks and Nature spokesperson Kaley McLachlan-Burton said.

Like a baseball pitcher’s mound, McLachlan-Burton said, a cricket practice pitch mimics one small section of a whole cricket playing field. The Felida practice pitch is a narrow corridor that’s steel-framed and will be enclosed with netting, plus all-weather carpeting that resembles grass and gives your ball a natural bounce.

“A practice pitch is like a batting cage,” McLachlan-Burton said, referring to the baseball practice area.

The Felida pitch’s total construction cost will be about $140,000, McLachlan-Burton said, which will come from the Parks and Nature major maintenance fund. The price includes $75,000 for concrete, artificial grass, posts and netting. The rest is adjacent improvements, staff time and permitting, she said.

Installing these two cricket pitches is part of a “system-wide effort … to meet a growing demand,” McLachlan-Burton said in an email, noting the sport’s emerging popularity is similar to pickleball.

“There is a vibrant and growing cricket community in Clark County, with participation in both adult and youth cricket events and leagues on the rise,” McLachlan-Burton said. “Local cricket players currently travel to play matches in Gresham, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Salem and Eugene. There are currently no fields in Southwest Washington.”

“We’ve had cricket leagues in the Portland area ever since the 1990s,” said Lokesh Pupli, a physician who lives in Felida and works at Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center. “There used to be four cricket teams. Now there are around 20.”

Pupli said he knows of five cricket pitches south of the Columbia River in nearby Oregon. He first started talking to Vancouver and Clark County parks departments about the need for a local one in the years just before the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

“We used to rent indoor baseball facilities to practice cricket, but that has been getting too difficult,” he said. Parents, coaches and kids in Clark County want to be able to practice closer to home than Oregon, he said.

Clark County Parks and Nature has no additional or future parkland resources to devote to whole cricket fields, McLachlan-Burton said. A couple of practice pitches is the best the county can do right now.

In Felida, the practice pitch occupies the northern section of Felida Community Park. Additional trees will be planted to better screen the pitch from the neighborhood.

“While we did not conduct a formal community outreach effort to discuss adding the pitch to the park, we have had discussions with a few adjacent neighbors and have heard little concern about the installation,” McLachlan-Burton said.

Who plays cricket, anyway? What is the game’s backstory? A history posted online by the International Cricket Council, based in Dubai, says cricket was a leading sport in England in the early 1700s, when it also spread throughout the British Empire.

“It’s an English sport,” Pupli said, “but it’s also played by people in Ireland and the Caribbean and South Africa and Australia.”

While it’s played differently than baseball, cricket is a bat-and-ball game that shares one claim to fame with our national pastime: it’s long. Really, really long. How long? The shortest games take about three hours. According to the International Cricket Council, the longest are called “test matches” that can go on for — ready for this? — five days.