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Founded 1892. Revived 2022.
Cricket has been played in this valley for longer than most of the buildings on Mackenzie Avenue have stood. It stopped for eighty-four years. Then it started again.
A meeting at the Victoria Hotel
In the spring of 1892, a group met at the Victoria Hotel in Revelstoke and formed a cricket club. The Kootenay Star reported it in its edition of 7 May that year, noting the hope that enough interest existed to get a match played by the twenty-fourth of the month.
It did. From 1892 onward the club played consistently, and in time built up friendly rivalries with sides in Kelowna and Kamloops — the same Okanagan towns our players travel to today, a century later.
That first era ran for forty-six years. The club folded in 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, and it never restarted afterwards. Cricket disappeared from Revelstoke for the better part of a century.
Picked back up in 2022
In the summer of 2022, cricket came back. Matt Bramall, who had played weekly in England’s Midlands before moving here, was among those who got it going. What began as informal Wednesday and Saturday evening practices drew more than a dozen players through the season.
On Saturday 6 August 2022, eleven committed players travelled to the Kelowna Cricket Club and played Revelstoke’s first competitive match in over eighty years.
The club was formally ratified at the end of that year and now holds a certificate of incorporation from the B.C. Registry as a recognised sports club. As Bramall put it: “Our reason for being as a club is to provide opportunities to people in Revelstoke to play cricket.”
How we got here
The club is formed
A cricket club is founded at a meeting in the Victoria Hotel, reported in the Kootenay Star of 7 May. The first match is hoped for on 24 May.
Forty-six seasons
Cricket is played consistently in Revelstoke, with friendly rivalries against clubs in Kelowna and Kamloops.
The club folds
On the eve of the Second World War the club stops playing. It does not restart afterwards, and cricket leaves the town for more than eight decades.
Revival, and a first competitive match
A grassroots group restarts the club. On 6 August, eleven players travel to Kelowna Cricket Club for Revelstoke’s first competitive fixture in over eighty years. The club is ratified at the end of the year.
A pitch of our own
A cricket pitch is built at Centennial Park, giving the club a proper home ground in Revelstoke for the first time in the modern era.
Home cricket returns
On Sunday 18 May, the club hosts the Kelowna Smashers at Centennial Park at 10:30 a.m. A minimum of twenty games are scheduled across the Interior Social Cricket Tournament season.
A fifth straight season, in a new league
The Interior competition rebrands as the Elite Cricket League. Revelstoke plays fourteen fixtures through a season running from May to October, winning six, against clubs from across the Kootenay and Thompson–Okanagan.
Growing the game away from the coast
Cricket in British Columbia has always been concentrated on the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island. Facilities, coaching and leagues followed the population, and the Interior was left with very little.
That is changing. The league Revelstoke plays in started with three teams and has grown to more than fifteen clubs across the Kootenay and Thompson–Okanagan regions. Work is underway to add women’s and youth sides to that structure.
For a town of our size to field a competitive team five years running is not a small thing. It happens because people keep turning up.
Grateful for the ground we stand on
“The Revelstoke Cricket Club is incredibly grateful to be able to play this wonderful sport in such a small and beautiful town.”
Our squad includes players who grew up with the game in India and elsewhere, many of them relatively new to Revelstoke, alongside locals who had never played before. The club’s kit reflects where we are: black and yellow, with alpine blue accents.
Add your name to the story
The next chapter is written by whoever shows up. Players, volunteers and supporters are all welcome.