Arjun Bhalla strikes out his opponent by catching a fly ball on Montgomery County’s newly-designated cricket field in Germantown.

“It’s like baseball, when it’s in the air you catch it and it’s out,” Bhalla said.

His opponent groaned in defeat.

Bhalla is one of about a thousand cricket players in the Maryland Premier Cricket League. Montgomery County officials say they want their parks to be as diverse as its population.

Bijal Shah, co-founder of the premier league, began petitioning the county for a cricket-only field back in 2006, as the county’s demographic makeup changed.

“It’s a game changer,” Shah said. “We’ve come a long way.”

Shah says he remembers going to a Rockville permit office and asking to file a permit for a field to play cricket.

He says the woman at the office thought he was talking about an insect.

But now he has a designated field to play on, measuring 400 feet in diameter. Shah says it’s a step up from where they used to play.

“It’s an interesting journey,” Shah said. “We were playing on empty lots, parking lots, tennis courts, baseball fields where we were kicked out many times…”

Montgomery Parks Director Mike Riley says as the county’s population mix changes, so does the demand for different types of sports.

“The sport of cricket has been around a long time,” Riley said. “We have residents increasingly coming from countries who play the sport of cricket and have played it for decades.”

The sport began in the late 16th century in Great Britain and spread to other parts of the British Empire. It’s especially popular in India, Pakistan, Australia, and many other countries.

“[The] British left obviously, but the game stayed,” Shah said. “There are about 30 to 40 countries playing international cricket on a regular basis.”

Today, it’s estimated that millions of people watch the World Cup of Cricket every year.

Shah’s league has 30 adult teams and 40 to 50 kids in their own league. The field was already booked for the season before the opening, according to Montgomery Parks.

Maryland will be hosting the National Youth Cricket League tournament next year.

Some cricket games can last five days, and can run five to eight hours a day. According to the county’s website, the field will be $27 an hour to rent.

For Mahendra Sapa, founder of the Maryland Cricket League, that’s a lot of money for his non-profit league to spend. He has more than 500 players in 20 adult teams and 7 kids teams. The money Sapa raises from the adult league goes to support math tutoring for kids in Maryland, a youth cricket program and to underprivileged children in India.

“[My league] is for the community, by the community” Sapa said. “They want to treat this ground as slightly upscale from the other ground.”

Other athletic fields in the area charge as little as $9 an hour with a two-hour minimum, according to the website.

Sapa says he wants to petition the Montgomery County Council to lower the price of the field.

“I fight for the grounds all the time,” Sapa said. “Every game we have to plan for in advance. Six to 12 months in advance.”

With thousands of people playing the game in the county, there aren’t enough fields to go around. The county is working on creating a second field next to this one. But, Sapa believes five to six more fields are needed to meet the increasing demand.

This story originally appeared at WAMU. It has been updated to reflect that Maryland will host the National Youth Cricket League tournament in 2020.