Unfortunately, there is nothing to preview this week. All 3 of our teams were scheduled to play this weekend, which is shaping up as the best weekend weather we've had for a while after already losing 6 games to rain. However, we received notice from the Nova Scotia Cricket Association (NSCA) on Monday that the whole weekend has been cancelled due to the HRM apparently double booking the field, and priority being given to a baseball tournament instead.
Let's look at that closer - rather than give baseball a minor inconvenience and have them split their tournament across 2 locations, the HRM have instead decided to give cricket the ultimate inconvenience of completely shutting down the sport for a prime weekend in summer. Their own inability to provide cricket with it's own dedicated field after a decade or more is now being compounded by their decisions to give other sports, with abundant facilities, priority to the Halifax Common field which is our ONLY facility.
It does not take much effort to notice unofficial cricket being played in parks all over the HRM every single day. On a daily walk around the Halifax Common, one would see multiple make-shift cricket pitches and dozens of people playing. The same scenes can be seen in Gorsebrook Park, Bedford, Dartmouth, Sackville, Clayton Park and elsewhere. With growing immigration in the HRM, there is a corresponding spike in the number of people looking to play cricket. That is reflected in the number of team and individual requests that the NSCA get, but unfortunately have to turn down. The lack of a dedicated cricket field has reduced organized cricket in Halifax to an embarrassingly low number of approximately. 180 players, consigning hundreds or perhaps even thousands of others to playing on unsuitable surfaces without the protections offered by playing under the umbrella of the provincial sports organization.
While we understand that a new dedicated field isn't an easy deliverable, we are disappointed that the HRM won't make decisions in the short term that would be a massive help for cricket while presenting only a minor inconvenience to other sports. For as long as cricket continues to only have one field in the city (Halifax Common), and with such a high demand to play, it would seem logical that cricket gets full access to that field (sunrise to sunset on weekends, all weeknights) to at least maximize what can be offered. While we respect other sports such as softball and touch football, the reality is that they have dozens of alternate venues to play, and cricket doesn't. It just seems a logical decision to maximize the sport field inventory that HRM currently has. And wouldn't require investment of a single dollar!
This is all amplified in the current season by the presence of the North American Indigenous Games (NAIG), and the fact that this big event is being held at the Halifax Common. This prevents cricket from using the field for 3 weekends in July, a huge chunk of our season given the short Halifax summers and the HRM not allowing sport bookings on grass fields until the end of May (later than NB and PEI despite the fact our May weather is generally better than theirs). We acknowledge that HRM has made efforts to alleviate this by providing us with bookings on Tuesday weeknights, but we wish that they wouldn't stop there. Giving cricket 5 nights a week and weekend mornings would allow the NSCA to accept more teams and players, increase its programming, and host more inter-provincial tournaments with the resulting economic impacts of that. And its not as if cricket is the new kid on the block - the sport's history at the Halifax Common stretches back over a century!
There is an entire community of athletes, including women and children, many of whom are new Canadians, who do not get to access an activity they love. There is also an entire community out there who may enjoy participating in a new sport but don't get that chance. We demand that the HRM undertake every possible effort to provide cricket with it's own dedicated fields, and in the interim, allow cricket full access to the one field it currently has.