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The overgrown tee box on the first hole at Oakwood Golf Course in 2020.
Batters and wickets are set to replace birdies and sand traps at the former Oakwood Golf Course in north Amherst.
The town plans to convert a large portion of the executive golf course into cricket fields, Supervisor Brian J. Kulpa said recently.
It’s a way to bring the property at Tonawanda Creek and New roads back to life and provide much-needed space for the growing number of cricket players in Amherst and the Buffalo Niagara region.
”We want to give them a formal home in town,” Kulpa said. “It’s a popular sport.”
The town had considered reviving Oakwood – either in its existing form as a nine-hole course or by expanding it to 18 holes – at a time when officials had weighed shrinking the 18-hole Audubon Golf Course in central Amherst. But with Audubon staying, and getting an update under the town’s latest proposal, Amherst leaders reconsidered how best to use the Oakwood course that has fallen into disrepair.
It’s welcome news for cricket players and league officials, who regularly travel to fields in Niagara or Monroe counties to play in matches that draw teams from throughout upstate New York. Some contests even take place in parking lots or on tennis courts.
”We have so many people who play in Buffalo,” said Mustafa Syed, an organizer of the Amherst United Cricket Club. “There’s no place to play at all.”
Amherst officials have wrestled for years over what to do with its three town-operated courses: the 18-hole Audubon course, the Par 3 Audubon course and Oakwood.
The Par 3 and Oakwood courses are both nine holes but the Par 3 course has shorter holes, meant for beginning golfers, while the Oakwood course has regular-length holes.
In the late 1990s, a period of high interest in the sport, Amherst golfers pressed the town to construct an additional course or expand Oakwood, which was built by a private developer and acquired by the town in the 1970s, according to Buffalo News archives.
That never happened. Fast forward two decades, and the fate of Oakwood became wrapped up in the contentious debate over how to proceed with the Amherst Central Park plan focused on the area on and around the former Westwood Country Club.
The Central Park plan previously called for transforming the 18-hole Audubon course into an updated, nine-hole course with a virtual reality golf center, sports fields and room for future development, a proposal that irritated the course’s regular players.
The town sought to placate those golfers by suggesting Oakwood could be expanded as part of a plan that included a combined golf clubhouse and visitors’ center for the adjoining Buffalo Niagara Heritage Village.
Kulpa and other town officials changed their minds after seeing the success of Indigo Golf Partners in operating Audubon in 2021. The town plans to invest in, not carve up, Audubon as part of the updated Central Park project.
Oakwood is another story. The course hasn’t opened for play for several years.
Some neighbors have grown frustrated at the lack of attention to the Oakwood property.
Gail Jahreis spoke out about the issue at an Amherst Town Board meeting on Nov. 7, 2022.
“The last couple of years the Oakwood Golf Course has just declined,” Jahreis said. “It is such a shame.”
She said any residents who kept their properties in this condition would be cited by the town and she wondered what Amherst’s plan was for the former course.
Kulpa told Jahreis that a cricket league was interested in leasing at least the front portion of the property, closest to the museum.
He also assured her the town would do a better job of mowing the property.
In a recent interview, Kulpa said Indigo wasn’t interested in operating Oakwood as a golf course. Instead, the town planned to create several cricket fields on the golf course grounds.
”They’re huge,” Kulpa said of the fields, so the playing areas “probably” will cover the entire course.
He said the sport is growing in popularity and the town should provide a space for its players.
The town would have a similar agreement with the cricket league as with the Little League baseball organization that uses town venues, with the league responsible for maintenance costs, utilities and indemnifying the town from legal liability, Kulpa said.
Ellicott Creek Park in the Town of Tonawanda has a cricket field but players often must travel to fields in Niagara Falls, Lockport, Lewiston or the Rochester area.
Kulpa didn’t provide a precise dollar figure but he said creating the fields at Oakwood wouldn’t carry a high cost. He said he thought the work could be done by next fall.
“It’s the ideal location,” said Jacqui Berger, a Town Board member, who has talked to cricket advocates for several years about the town creating a permanent place for them to play. She said proponents once took her to Ellicott Creek Park, where they dressed her in cricket gear and let her take an at-bat.
There are around 25 cricket teams in a section of upstate stretching across Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany.
“There’s a huge push coming from all these players,” said Sibu Nair, a leading activist in the local Indian American community who serves as New York’s deputy director for Asian American affairs.
Interest in cricket is particularly strong in the Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Jamaican and other immigrant communities, players and league officials said. There are similarities to baseball, with batters and pitchers, known as bowlers in this case, but there are rules and terms specific to the sport of cricket.
Sunny Kumar is a president of the Buffalo Niagara Cricket Club, part of the Western New York Cricket League, who played cricket while in school in his native India.
”It’s an extremely popular sport,” Kumar said.
Cricket fields need a lot of room around them because the ball can travel great distances and, Syed said, sometimes break windows at neighboring homes.
Building a dedicated cricket venue in Amherst also could help the area attract teams from farther away to local tournaments, advocates said.
The smart way to start your day. We sift through all the news to give you a concise, informative look at the top headlines and must-read stories every weekday.
News Staff Reporter
I report on development, government, crime and schools in the northern Erie County suburbs. I grew up in the Town of Tonawanda and worked at the Post-Standard in Syracuse before joining The News in 2001. Email: swatson@buffnews.com
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The overgrown tee box on the first hole at Oakwood Golf Course in 2020.
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