Drexel Looks Back to the Future
Drexel at the Mid Atlantic C’ship
by Drexel Club Management
Last year many of Drexel’s main players graduated and the team went into a transition period as college teams tend to do, trying to rebuild a squad for the tournaments to come. Club Management of Harshil Patel, Sneh Patel, Roshni Chashmawalla, Anant Tantia and others had a job in their hands as they embarked on building a team for the future. The vision was to give match experiences to the new players who had come and to make them feel like home. Setting up practices day in and day out, getting the paperwork completed so that these new students could quickly be playing cricket at Drexel , were some of the important tasks the management worked on.
We took American College Cricket’s strategy of growing the game to heart and got the entire team Sharing on Facebook, and became the number 1 team at doing so. One direct result of this was, more people came to know about the club, and came to join. In fact in the video President Lloyd Jodah took when he visited our practice at Drexel’s Rec Center in October there were about 30 players practicing.
The 2018 Mid Atlantic Regionals was a great accomplishment for Drexel as we won it.The return of one of our top batsman Aakarsh Malhotra together with another veteran Faraz Zaidi made a big difference while we also gave chances to Freshmen and other Sophomore and Junior students who had not played in a competitive tournament ever before. Ajinkya Dhage took 7 wickets, 2nd most in the tournament. We also got other students to show up to support us, and it was awesome to play with cheers from them. Mr Jodah loved that we got spectators to show up, and said we were a good example to follow.
Playing in the National Championship is never easy as all the teams elevate their competitiveness but we gave our all. The 5 freshmen we took gained really great experience for the future and perhaps next year we can get back to similar performances like 2015 when we got to the Finals. Nationals is awesome because of the wonderful organization and meeting so many other students from around USA and Canada, and even when you don’t win everyone has a fantastic Spring Break.
American College Cricket is an experience which can really help you travel miles in life and being on the field, trying to make strategies and assessing strengths and weaknesses of other players really gives a learning experience not only in the game but also valuable in life in general. We at Drexel haven’t lost, we are winning every single day with our hard work, dedication and practice. Watch out for Dragons in the upcoming seasons!
