The SF Super Kings, San Francisco's only cricket team.

Walking by Garfield Square on Treat and 25th, you’re likely to see people playing soccer. Whether it be Latino men playing the game that is near religion in their country of origin or youth leagues in pint-sized world cups, it’s almost always soccer. But, if you walk by at the right time on Monday morning you’ll see another game in the works: cricket.

Playing this bat-and-ball game, popular in much of the former British Empire, are the SF Super Kings. In addition to being San Francisco’s only organized cricket team, the Super Kings are made up exclusively of Indian chefs who work in kitchens of restaurants around the Bay Area.

The Super Kings formed in 2009, when Dhiru Paulraj Kumar, a chef at Dosa who has recently moved to helm his own restaurant in Philadelphia, got together to play with other recent immigrants to the Mission. The group consists mainly of transplants from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, many of whom met while in culinary school in the city of Chennai. Because they’re all chefs who don’t work Monday, playing cricket, a childhood love for many, was an obvious way to spend their day off.

In the larger Bay Area, the SF Super Kings are not alone. The team plays other groups from San Jose and Sunnyvale, which even supports an organized league, the Bay Area Cricket Alliance.

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Daniel Hirsch is a freelance writer who has been living in the Mission since 2009. When he's not contributing to Mission Local, he's writing plays, working as an extra for HBO, and/or walking to the top of Bernal Hill.

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10 Comments

  1. This is every great movement for the sf super kings cricket team .. Wish you all sf kings guys….

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  2. I’m not sure they are “SF’s only organized cricket team”.

    There is one organized by the Pig and Whistle on Geary Street that plays in the Marin cricket league, or so I recall from a few years ago anyway.

    The south bay has a lot of cricket, reflecting the preponderance of South Asians living there.

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