During spring break, the Cricket Club at UIS participated in the American College Cricket (ACC) Dream11 National Championship, a national tournament held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from March 16-20.

The national tournament is the second recent tournament the Cricket Club at UIS has participated in under the ACC schedule, as they also competed in the 2015 Dream11 ACC Midwest Regionals, in which their performance clinched an at-large bid for the national tournament.

Placed in Pool C, the Stars were first matched up against the University of Texas-Arlington Mavericks on March 17.

Siddharth Modali led the Stars, and all scorers, in runs with 49 runs off just 16 balls, but the effort was in vain as UTA defeated UIS 119/4 to 117/10.

Later in the day on March 17, the Stars played against Northeastern University, who recorded a strong first inning, tallying 159 runs, 84 of them by Aditya Santhanam.

When they came to bat in the second inning, the Stars attempted to rally back from the deficit, led by Modali, Sai Vijay, team captain Rajeev Porandla, and Chandrahas Buddiraju.

Each scored double digits in runs, but they fell short as Northeastern won 159-137.

On March 18, the Stars finished pool play against the Northern Illinois University Huskies. The Stars lost to the Huskies, sending their pool record play to 0-3.

UTA ultimately won the pool and advanced to the quarterfinals, where they would lost to the eventual national champion, the University of South Florida Bulls.

Despite the losses, Porandla took positives away from the experience.

“Being a young team, it delivered a decent performance and could had even won the first two games if the team happened to play to their potentials. It was a nice exposure to represent UIS for the nationals, the cricket team learned a lot and did get a feel of competition in a tournament of such levels,” Porandla said.

Porandla stated that the experience at the tournament will help the Cricket Club at UIS in the future.

“We believe going forward this exposure would help the club to perform better in other tournaments,” Porandla said.

Porandla also indicated that additional practice will be beneficial for the team.

“More practice before the tournament would have changed the entire scenario,” Porandla said.

Porandla stated that UIS provides a good platform for those interested in cricket.

“UIS is a very good platform for cricketers because I’ve seen other universities not promoting cricket a lot, but in here we have intramural cricket, and we have special officials who are officiating some matches. UIS is promoting cricket a lot,” Porandla said.

To Porandla, such a platform for cricket allows him to pursue his passion.

“Cricket is my passion […] I didn’t have much support from my family like to play cricket, but [it] still is my passion. I feel happy when I play cricket. They wanted [me] to focus more on my studies, but still I love cricket. My passion drives me forward,” Porandla said.