World Footy News

A permanent home for USFooty and Australian Football in the United States may currently be under construction in the City of Lauderhill, Florida. Broward County is currently constructing a stadium with 5,000 covered seats for cricket (and football) at a cost of $30m as part of a sporting complex that will include three full size cricket (football) grounds. According to the Ft Lauderdale's Fighting Squids' Joshua Goodstein, the County plans to place goal posts on the field and is working towards hosting the 2009 USFooty Nationals. If the renderings are anything to go by this will be a beautiful world class facility that will have the ability to host major events including USFooty Nationals, AFL games and possibly the 2012 AFL International Cup (Editor: probably just speculation but you never know).

On the Friday before East vs West game, Broward County hosted a tour by USFooty officials, who by all accounts, were very impressed. The scheduled open date is mid-December 2007, and according to Goodstein, both the Broward County Parks System and USFooty continue to work together in order to bring footy events to this state of the art facility.

The mayor of Lauderhill, Richard Kaplan, became enamored with cricket after visits to the Caribbean. Lauderhill has been hosting a regional cricket tournament for the last few years. Kaplan unsuccessfully lobbied the West Indies to have Lauderhill host games during the current World Cup. Despite that failure, Kaplan has forged ahead with a somewhat paired down stadium (5,000 seats and a "hill" instead of the original 30,000 seats) and convinced Broward County to transform the land into the premier stadium for cricket and footy in the United States. Groundbreaking took place in 2005 and the project was slowed by Hurricane Wilma, but now County and City officials are confident that the facility would be ready by December.

The Central Broward Regional Park as the facility is currently known will sport a main cricket/footy oval with a 5,000 seat stand and a grassed outer with capacity for 20,000. This field will be 180m in length. Next to the main oval will be two more cricket/footy ovals that will double as four soccer pitches. Each of these ovals will be 165m in length. All three ovals will be under lights. The facility will also have tennis courts, basketball courts and even netball courts. As this is Florida the facility is also planning to have a water park and boat ramps. One simple yet innovative idea is to construct a field that could either be two soccer/rugby fields next to each other or one cricket/footy oval. If more US counties would follow Broward County's lead the US would not lack for footy fields. The stadium itself harks back to traditional cricket stadiums with covered bleaches extending either side of the main building, the "Field House", a glassed in viewing area. No doubt a very comfortable place for watching the willow striking leather on a warm Florida day.

This facility will become the only cricket oval capable of hosting First Class cricket in the U.S.. While Philadelphia sports a number of old and storied cricket clubs the city has not hosted a First Class match since before the 1920s and some clubs like the Philadelphia Cricket Club did not actually start playing cricket again until relatively recently. With immigrants from the Caribbean and South Asia, the U.S. has a large and growing cricket population but seems to have been hamstrung by politics at the national level.

The city is hoping to convince the ICC to host international teams to compete at the stadium. Hopefully, Australia would consider playing the West Indies at the stadium. Even better would be Carlton vs Collingwood!

For the latest renderings click here.