The event is a four team round-robin U-19 tournament featuring 40-over games each day this weekend at the Miramar Regional Park with a scheduled start time of 10 a.m.

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By Peter Della Penna

This weekend in south Florida, the Florida Cricket Academy in association with the city of Miramar is hosting the Miramar Youth Cricket Festival, a four team round-robin U-19 tournament featuring 40-over games each day this weekend at the Miramar Regional Park with a scheduled start time of 10 a.m. This is the second youth tournament organized by the FCA after they put on an U-19 tournament in November 2009.

FCA President Wayne Ramnarine hopes that this year’s tournament will provide more opportunities to young players from around the country. After teams from New York and Connecticut took part in the 2009 event, this year’s teams include the Michigan Cricket Academy, the Atlanta-based Cricket Academy USA, the Florida-based Big Broward Academy as well as an FCA team featuring Steven Taylor, who toured with the USA senior team over the summer in Italy.

“Steven Taylor is going to be the captain of the academy for the next few years,” said FCA President Wayne Ramnarine. “I’m very happy with the progress he’s made. Trevor Singh also is coming down. He’s down here playing with our academy just to get a little bit of a warm-up for the USACA trials next week.”

Both MCA and CAUSA have previously sent their players to participate in summer tournaments organized by the California Cricket Academy, but they are hoping to gain more experience for the players through an event that is taking place in the winter months when outdoor cricket is not available in their home territory.

“We hardly have much cricket for the youngsters in this region so since we had this opportunity, we thought we’d put a team together and participate in the tournament,” said Anand Tummala, head coach of CAUSA.

“In this tournament, we want to leave an impact there with positive behavior on the field as young cricketers and to play 40 overs, either you’re batting first or chasing, to bat 40 overs and to be disciplined,” said Tummala. “That is something which is missing in our junior cricket. Players don’t realize the importance of batting out the quota of overs. We get out batting 30 overs and make 150 all out and not realizing that had we batted for 10 more overs, probably we could have got 40 or 50 runs more. Most important is to travel well as a team. You have to be backing each other up at any cost. That’s how you can tour well and enjoy the game.”

The 2009 FCA tournament had an impressive list of sponsors and Ramnarine said he is happy to have good support again for junior cricket in this weekend’s event.

“We want to thank Laparkan and USACA treasurer John Thickett for their sponsorship and the city of Miramar,” said Ramnarine.