Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Kalpesh Patel, a Columbia graduate student at SEAS, probably loves cricket more than you. Okay, that might not be fair?I have no idea how much you love cricket?but he?s sure done a lot for the sport and its exposure in America.
Patel pretty much established the first team to play in the first ever American College Cricket (ACC) season at the University of Miami. Since then, he?s seen the game spread itself across the US.
?I have seen the game grow from a league with only five American Colleges in 2008, to one with over 60 North American Colleges (in the United States and Canada),? he wrote in an email to Spectrum.
Patel wanted to do more, however. After this first season, he maintained a relationship with the company?s management because he wanted to use his finance, math, and engineering background to expand cricket even further. A class at Columbia?Studies in Operations Research?helped him come up with something concrete with a team of other students over a period of three months.
?We developed a series of quantitative rankings for the company to use, and also built linear programming models to help the company to pick/choose different schedules based on a number of different parameters,? he wrote. These parameters included costs, number of teams, number of fields, and the number of games each team wanted to play.
Even though the first semester of the class is over, the project isn?t. Now, though, there are more students?around eight?working on the programming models and rankings.
?The plan is that we will continue to work with ACC over the next semester as part of two classes: ?Studies in Operations Research? and also ?Operations Consulting.??
Patel hopes that Columbia will be remembered for its (as well as his) contributions to making cricket a mainstream college sport in North America, especially as there are plans to move forward in the project?s efforts.
?The future work planned involves the implementation of the rankings alongside a database which will keep track of all ACC games, and provide statistics for teams players etc. We will also assist management with developing an infrastructure for providing live scores of games on the company?s website, generating revenue from this feature, as well as marketing and promoting the game of cricket across college campuses in the United States and Canada,? he wrote.
Even if you you have limited exposure to cricket (like me), you have to admit it?this is pretty awesome. Who knows? Maybe soon Columbia will have a cricket team?to cheer on to call its own.
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