Cricket surges in Broward County, connecting Caribbean roots and youth

Cricket is moving from Broward County parks into academies and international-caliber stadiums, and in Lauderhill the sport has become a way for Caribbean families to pass down identity, discipline and belonging to children. What once looked like a niche pastime now has a visible footprint in public space, youth training and professional scheduling.

Lauderhill has become Broward’s cricket center

Central Broward Park & Broward County Stadium sits at the center of that shift. The Lauderhill venue opened on November 9, 2007 at a cost of $70 million, and it was the first U.S. cricket ground certified by the International Cricket Council to host international matches. It hosted its first international Twenty20 series in 2010, with New Zealand and Sri Lanka, and later served as one of the American host sites for the 2024 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup.

That history matters because it gives Broward County something rare in the United States: a purpose-built cricket venue with international credentials already in place. Broward County also announced that Cognizant Major League Cricket would play at Broward County Stadium in Lauderhill for the first time July 1-6, 2025, a move the county said came as more than 100 million fans worldwide watched MLC games the previous year. Major League Cricket describes itself as the premier professional Twenty20 cricket league in the United States.

For local fans, those dates were more than a tournament listing. They marked another step in turning Lauderhill into a place where the amateur, youth and professional levels of the sport overlap in one public venue.

The game is being handed down through families

At Florida Cricket Academy, the sport is not treated as a novelty. Head coach Timmy Surujbally says many West Indian children are trying to get involved in cricket, and the academy is built to help them enter the game while carrying a legacy forward. Founder Wayne Ramnarine created the program because, in his view, there was no structured place for kids to learn cricket properly and connect it to their roots.

Florida business records show Florida Cricket Academy Inc. was incorporated in 2008, which means the youth pipeline now being discussed in Broward has been building for years. That matters because the academy is not just teaching batting and bowling mechanics. It is also giving children a setting where cricket functions as language, memory and social code inside a county that has changed through immigration and generational turnover.

The result is a sports program that doubles as cultural instruction. Children learn how to play, but they also learn why the game matters to parents and grandparents who carried cricket with them from the Caribbean.

Why Lauderhill is such a natural fit

Lauderhill’s demographic profile explains a lot about why cricket has taken root there. The city had 74,482 residents in the 2020 Census and an estimated population of about 75,668 in July 2025. Census QuickFacts lists Lauderhill as a majority-Black city with a foreign-born population of 37.6 percent and 26.5 percent of residents speaking a language other than English at home.

Those numbers do not tell the whole story, but they help explain why cricket feels at home in the city. Lauderhill has long been a gathering place for Caribbean and South Asian communities that already know the game, and Broward’s broader population changes are making that connection more visible in public parks, stadium seating and youth training sessions. When families arrive in South Florida with cricket already part of daily life, the sport is more likely to become a community habit than a specialized import.

The city’s scale also helps. At roughly 75,000 residents, Lauderhill is large enough to sustain local youth programs and small enough for a stadium to become a recognizable civic landmark. That is one reason the venue at Central Broward Park has become such a visible symbol of Broward’s changing recreation landscape.

A public venue with a growing pathway

Broward County parks are part of the story because cricket now has a place to grow outside private clubs and backyards. Central Broward Park & Broward County Stadium gives kids a direct line of sight from early instruction to elite competition, with international matches and professional events taking place on the same ground where the county has built its cricket identity.

Johnny Grave, the Major League Cricket chief executive, has described the sport as a powerful part of Caribbean culture and identity. That framing fits Broward’s current moment. The county is not just hosting a sport that arrived from elsewhere. It is building a public framework that lets a regional pastime become visible to the next generation, especially children whose families already treat cricket as part of who they are.

The progression is concrete. Families bring children to learn the game. Coaches and academy founders give those children structure. The county provides a stadium that can host international matches. Professional leagues then add another layer of legitimacy, showing local players and spectators that cricket can live in Broward as both heritage and entertainment.

What Broward’s cricket boom says about the county

The growth of cricket in Broward is also a sign of how the county’s public spaces are being reshaped by demographic change. A stadium built for international play, a youth academy founded to create structure, and a county schedule that now includes Major League Cricket all point in the same direction: cricket is no longer operating at the margins.

For Broward, that has practical consequences. More youth participation means more demand for coaching, field access and organized play. More professional events mean more visibility for a sport that once struggled for room in American recreation calendars. And more families turning out for cricket creates a civic identity that connects Lauderhill’s Caribbean roots to a broader South Florida audience.

The long-term story is not just that cricket is growing in Broward County. It is that the county now has the venues, the families and the youth pipeline to make that growth durable.