In 1988, Safdar Khan was a lonely UI student, studying for his Ph.D. in veterinary medicine, and missing his family and friends back in Pakistan. Then one day, his American roommate - having heard Khan pining for his favorite sport - mentioned that he had seen students out in a field near Orchard Downs, all dressed in white and playing cricket.
"I said, 'You're kidding me! Nobody plays cricket in the U.S.' But I went there and sure enough, there were a few students playing," Khan said. "I was ecstatic. It was unbelievable. I was so, so happy."
Khan is now an adjunct instructor at the College of Veterinary Medicine and a board certified veterinary toxicologist. More than 20 years have passed since the day he discovered the Cricket Club of Illinois, but Khan - joined by his four sons - is still playing with CCI.
"He's still one of the sharpest fielders, and he's still one of the best hitters," says Tanweer Alam, a business intelligence analyst with the UI Foundation and opening batsman for CCI.
Alam's path to CCI was more direct. During his undergraduate years at the University of Oklahoma, Alam traveled every weekend to play cricket with the Tulsa Cricket Association (one of three clubs in Tulsa), through which he met a St. Louis cricket club, and eventually CCI. In 2000, when he decided to pursue his master's degree in management information systems at the UI, CCI came calling. "Before I moved here, those guys knew I was coming," Alam said. "As soon as I landed, they contacted me."
The game dates back to 16th-century England, spread throughout the British Empire, and today is second only to soccer in worldwide popularity (perhaps that's why the Twitter sign-in screen frequently features a photo of cricketers). In the U.S., the game was modified into what is now known as baseball, which has pitchers instead of bowlers, catchers instead of wicketkeepers, four bases instead of two wickets, seven fielders instead of 10, an infield instead of a "pitch" (a 22-yard long strip of hard clay with a jute mat on top), and foul balls (the batsmen can send the ball in any direction in cricket).
Made up almost entirely of UI students and faculty and staff members, CCI competes in the Midwest Cricket Conference Division II against teams based in Chicago; St. Louis; Madison, Wisc.; Milwaukee; Peoria; Springfield; and West Lafayette, Ind. Because the season begins in April and officially ends in late August, most league matches occur during the summer, but CCI has been advancing in an invitational tournament this month. And workshops the cricketers are currently conducting at several Urbana schools have proven so popular that Varun Turlapati, the CCI captain, says he's getting requests for more sessions.
"Almost everybody on the team is from somewhere else, but we want Americans to join as well," Turlapati said.
Having grown up in India, Turlapati "cautiously joined" a Chicago-area cricket team while earning his master's degree in electrical and computer engineering at UIC, noticing that the team was dominated by Pakistani players. With the history of violence between their adjacent countries in mind, Turlapati resolved to keep his outgoing personality in check until he had a chance to gauge the friendliness of his teammates. Within days, however, the Pakistani city of Lahore was targeted by suicide bombers. Overhearing one teammate on the phone, frantically contacting loved ones, persuaded Turlapati that he and his teammates had more than cricket in common.
"We are the same," he wrote, in a blog post about a concept he calls "second-level diplomacy." "Maybe our premiers should invite each other every time there is a cricket match at either side of the border."
Khan had felt the same trepidation when he joined CCI in 1988, when it had more players from India. Like Turlapati, he found that their passion for the sport overshadows the strife between their home countries. "It's a bonding force," Khan said. "People from different faiths, different colors, different religions, different cultures - cricket doesn't care where you come from. You play as a team. It's not Indian or Pakistani or Sri Lankan; it's really politics aside. There may be tension between the two countries, but not on the cricket ground. Not in the Cricket Club of Illinois. No way."