In Hammad Shahid’s room on the fourth floor of the Delta Hotel in Markham, Ontario, several members of the USA U-19 squad are huddled together in the dark one night while watching a horror movie on pay-per-view. “Drag Me to Hell” is the entertainment for that evening before the next day’s match at the ICC U-19 World Cup Global Qualifer. It’s quite appropriate considering that’s exactly what a lot of batsmen feel like when they take guard against the 17-year-old fast bowler from Cypress, Calif.

At the Global Qualifier, Shahid routinely had opponents hopping around at the crease. However, that should be no surprise to those who face him on a regular basis in the Southern California Cricket Association. Shahid currently plays for Vijayta CC, who finished first in Division One in 2008, and even though he is still a teenager, he clearly has the respect of adult players around the league.

“I have faced Hammad about three times in a game and he has got me out once,” said Aditya Thyagarajan, captain of 2009 SCCA Division One champion Hollywood CC. Thyagarajan is also a USA Men’s National Team member and a teammate of Shahid on the South West Region team. “He has always bowled well. He is one of the difficult bowlers to face in the SCCA Division One, definitely might be the most difficult.”

Picture (Left): Hammad Shahid

Shahid was born in Anaheim, Calif., but his parents took him back to their homeland of Pakistan when he was only a few months old. After living in Karachi, they returned to California when Hammad was six, along with his younger brother Shayan, who was born in Pakistan.

Shahid had seen cricket on television before and had watched his father, Abdul, and uncle, Asif, play in matches in California. However, it wasn’t until his father saw an ad in a local paper for Dr. Asif and Nina Ahmad’s La Mirada Cricket Academy that Shahid truly caught the cricket bug. So at the age of 12, Shahid went for his first tryout at cricket. Immediately, coach Mumtaz Yusuf tagged Shahid with the nickname “Pindi” which he still carries today for his express right-arm pace bowling, believed to be in the mid-80 mph range. Yet, the nickname had a completely different connotation at its origin.

“He used to run faster than the ball,” said Yusuf. “I called him the Rawalpindi Express because the train was going faster. So I said, ‘You used to run faster than the ball.’”

“I ran from the boundary, running down, and I bowled and he’s like, ‘What are you doing?’” said Shahid, remembering the experience while trying not to laugh. “It was funny and then from there my nickname was ‘Pindi’ for Rawalpindi Express.”

Once Yusuf taught him the basics, it wasn’t long before the ball started going faster, much faster, than Shahid was running. Shahid started playing for Ventura CC in Division One of the SCCA as a 14-year-old alongside former West Indies Test bowler Franklyn Rose and former USA player Jignesh Desai. After one season there, he went and played for Citrus Valley CC before returning to Division One with Vijayta CC in 2008. As a 16-year-old, he was invited to the selection trials for the USA Men’s National Team that went to Jersey for the World Cricket League Division Five and just missed the cut.

“For the men’s team, he came to the selections, he bowled a great spell,” said Thyagarajan. “He bowled a spell to Steve Massiah and Carl Wright. He was looking really good. I think he just missed out on the trials to make the main team because there were some guys who were better and then he missed out on just one spot.”

For someone whose stock was rising so rapidly, it was a major surprise when he was selected as a Second-Team All-American coming out of the 2009 U-19 National Tournament this past May in Brooklyn, N.Y. Missing out on the First-Team meant missing out on the first round of ICC U-19 World Cup qualifying matches in July for Team USA. Shahid had just finished his fourth year with the South West Region U-19 team, but after taking six wickets in the U-19 National Tournament in 2008, the highly-rated pace bowler came away with only four wickets in three matches at the event in 2009.

“I was shocked how he could not make the US team, because to be honest, last year he was just one spot away from the US main team and I was really surprised to see how come he didn’t make the Under-19 team,” said Thyagarajan. “It was quite shocking because even here in the SCCA Division One league, he is the only Under-19 kid who looks like he can play really well in Division One.”

Reggie Benjamin, coach of the South West Region Men’s squad, wanted to have a look at him to see what he could do to help. Shahid competed with the South West team in 2008 and was expected to be with them again in 2009 at the Western Conference Tournament in Minneapolis, Minn. Almost immediately, Benjamin spotted several flaws in the bowler’s technique.

“His rhythm, he was running up way too fast, his approach at certain points of his delivery, he was approaching too fast,” said Benjamin. “So when he’d get up to bowl, his head, his hand, and all the technical positions were out of place. So his head was in the air by the time he’d release the ball, his eyes weren’t looking in at the area. His eyes would be looking at the sky up in the air because he was running in too fast.”

Benjamin also spotted some other things that needed some fine tuning. According to him, it wasn’t just the physical approach to the crease. Shahid still had a lot to learn about the mental approach to getting batsmen out.

“First thing, when he was approaching before, he couldn’t keep his head still to look and understand where he was going to bowl,” said Benjamin. “The next thing, the idea of bowling every ball to get a wicket was getting into him. That was his mentality. This ball is going to get a wicket. When fast bowling, in any bowling, every ball cannot be a wicket. You have to work on batsmen. You have to give a little to take a little and you have a different mentality. That process takes a little bit for him to understand.”

So the coach and the player worked together for a little over a month at the Woodley Cricket Complex in the Van Nuys suburb of Los Angeles before Shahid took off at the start of July to train in England at a camp run by former Indian Test spinner Bishen Singh Bedi. Shahid went to the UK alone and became homesick, especially without his mom’s cooking, but playing cricket every single day helped take his mind off being away.

After three and a half weeks spent mostly in Birmingham, he came back to America the day before the Western Conference Tournament started. Shahid began with a solid performance against Central East on day one and by day two against Central West, it was apparent that the work done by Benjamin and the time spent in England had paid off.

“Against Central West, we got him on to bowl and [Sushil] Nadkarni came out to bat,” said Thyagarajan, the vice-captain for South West in Minneapolis. “He’s one of the best players in the US. We got Hammad to bowl to him and he responded by getting him out.”

“The people that saw him that select him, they come and talk to me. After they saw him bowl in Minnesota, they said, ‘Look, this is a different bowler than what was up in New York in the Under-19 Tournament,’” said Benjamin. “In Minnesota, he had matured as a fast bowler. I told him that in a meeting. ‘All of the time, you used to bowl fast. This weekend, you just became a fast bowler,’ because everything that was taught and that was gelled and that he understood, he went out in the middle, in a game and executed that.”

Shahid’s form was heaven sent for South West, helping them to qualify for the National Championship, beginning Nov. 13 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. In the process, he was back to dragging batsmen to hell. As a result, he was rushed into the USA U-19 squad for the ICC U-19 World Cup Global Qualifier in September to bolster the fast bowling unit.

Picture (Right): Shahid with Muhammad Asad Ghous and Coach Sew Shivnaraine

In the first match against Vanuatu, he set the tone for what opposing teams could expect to face over the following two weeks with a menacing spell to open the tournament. Shahid bowled 7.4 overs and took two wickets for 12 runs. Even though star all-rounder Ryan Corns was named Man of the Match, he gave a lot of credit to Shahid for helping to setup the victory.

“It’s very good to finally have a pace bowler who can get it up around the ears,” said Corns. “He bowled good. He didn’t give anything away, bowled tight, dot balls…. Yeah, he did his job.”

While Shahid only finished with six wickets in six games, it doesn’t tell the whole story of his effect on the team to help them qualify for the ICC U-19 World Cup in New Zealand. Most batsmen were visibly uncomfortable facing him and generally flailed desperately outside off-stump, unable to catch up to his searing pace, in failed attempts to play the ball and score runs.

Shahid was also one of the best fielders USA had. He took two catches officially, although he took three as a substitute fielder in one match, and teamed up to effect three runouts during the tournament. It’s no surprise then to hear what Shahid says when asked about his favorite part of cricket.

“Catching,” he responds without hesitation. “I love catching the ball and bowling fast. When you catch the ball it feels real good.”

While Shahid is an emerging talent for USA, he doesn’t forget those who helped him get to where he is. He is grateful to Vijayta CC captain Mehul Dave for helping him develop against senior players in the SCCA as well as to USA Men’s National Team manager Imran Khan for giving him an opportunity to come to the selection trials in 2008. The teenager believes the biggest reason for his success so far has to do with the support of his parents, especially his mom, Shabana. She has driven him 47 miles each way to Fontana on most Saturdays and Sundays over the past five years so that he could train at the Citrus Valley Cricket Academy, formerly the La Mirada Cricket Academy.

In addition to the sacrifices his parents have made, Shahid also made a big one of his own. Standing at 6’4” on the basketball court, Shahid played center for two years on the JV team at Cypress HS before giving it up to focus solely on cricket, a move that has clearly paid off. The senior is undecided about where he’d like to go to college, but is thinking hard about choosing a university in England that would give him an opportunity to play competitive cricket while pursuing his dream of becoming a physical therapist.

According to Benjamin though, America has been dreaming of a talent like Shahid to come along for quite some time. Shahid will once again be a vital member of the South West squad as they prepare to take on the New York Region in the first semi-final match at the National Championship in Fort Lauderdale in less than two weeks. But it’s for the USA U-19 squad and the USA Men’s National Team that Benjamin can’t wait to see Shahid shine brightly.

“One thing I would like people to know, and I know this is gonna prove fact,” said Benjamin. “Not only is Hammad going to do well for the Under-19, I can see him in the US senior team, traveling wherever they are going to go next, as a member of the top 14 players in this country, as a true, real effective, worthy investment not only for Under-19, but for US cricket.”