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Mishank Shah
Stacey Dearing
ENGL 106
22 November 2013
Purdue University Cricket Club (Revised Paper)
Growing up in India, I have always considered cricket more than a sport. As
Sachin Tendulkar (also known as the god of cricket) once said, “Cricket is not just a
game, it is the only game.” What Tendulkar meant by this is that the people in India
consider cricket more than a game; they consider it a religion. I personally remember
waking up and going to play cricket with my friends. However, when I decided to come
to Purdue, I thought I would not be able to play cricket anymore since cricket is not a
popular sport in the USA. I was browsing through the sports available at Purdue on their
website and I was amazed to learn that Purdue has a cricket club known as PUCC
(Purdue University Cricket Club). I came to Purdue and I learned that there were going
to be try-outs since a lot of people were interested in playing for this club. I went for the
try-outs and I was chosen to play for ‘The Pistons’. This team was founded five years ago
by my captain, Ashwin Venkat. Niket Gupta, my vice captain, was a freshman when he
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joined ‘The Pistons’. The Pistons have been winning the “Natraj Iyer Indoor Cricket
League” since the past 3 years. After reading Swales’ article about a discourse
community, I am certain that PUCC is a discourse community. According to Swales,
there are few important criteria that constitute a discourse community. Some of the
criteria are as follows:
a) A discourse community has a set of common goals.
b) A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its
members.
c) A discourse community has its own lexis.
d) A discourse community has a threshold level of members.
e) A discourse community possesses one or more genres in the communicative
furtherance of its aims.
f) A discourse community uses its primary mechanisms to provide feedback
and information. (Swales 471-473)
The methodologies I used in this paper consists four primary sources and one
secondary source. I interviewed my captain, Ashwin Venkat. He is an important member
of our team and takes all the important decisions. I also interviewed my vice-captain,
Niket Gupta. Gupta has been part of this team ever since he was a freshman. He is the
vice-captain of this team and helps Venkat with the important decisions. These were my
first two primary sources. The third primary source I used was the PUCC website. The
PUCC website outlines the rules of the tournaments, the group and knockout stages of
the tournament and also the teams that are taking part in this tournament. One
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secondary source I used was John Swales’ article on Discourse Communities. The six
criteria stated in his article were very informative and helped me immensely while
writing this paper. We had cricket practice last Friday in the Armory. I observed many
things during the practice such as the terminology used, the body language, the
structure of the team. Thus, I used observations as my fifth and final source.
The PUCC website states “Purdue University Cricket Club (PUCC) brings together
a bunch of cricket-enthusiastic Purdue students who have been playing the game at and
for Purdue for over 20 years now.” (Purdue University Cricket Club). There is an indoor
cricket league that I am a part of known as “The Natraj Iyer Indoor Cricket League”.
There are a total of 16 teams in this competition with each team having more than 9
players at least. “The Pistons” meet every Friday around 8 pm at The Armory. We have
practice matches and cricket training sessions every Friday. We are currently in the
group stage of the competition. Each group has four teams. We play each team twice
and the top two teams of the group proceed to the next stage of the tournaments,
which is the knockout stage. All the members in the 16 teams have one common goal,
which is to eventually win the trophy. When I interviewed my captain, Ashwin Venkat
and asked him what the common goal of this tournament was, he replied, “The goal of
this tournament is to perform to the best of your ability and help your team win the
trophy.” Venkat always inspires us to go out there and give our hundred percent. He
inspires us to never give up and keep fighting till the last ball is bowled. My vice-captain,
Niket Gupta responded to the same question by saying, “ In the end, winning the trophy
is all that matters. That is the aim of every team in this tournament.” This satisfies
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Swales’ first criterion, which states that each discourse community has a set of common
goals. (Swales 471)
According to John Swales’ article, a discourse community has a particular lexis
(473). The Purdue University Cricket Club has a particular lexis of its own. Cricket is a
sport with a lot of terminology. It has a language of its own. There are so many terms in
this game that people often get confused while learning this sport. There are a lot of
confusing terms such as boundaries, mid-on, point, gully, cover, mid-off etc. When I
asked Venkat about the terminology used in cricket, he said, “There are so many terms
in cricket that I don’t even know some of them.” What Venkat meant by this quote was
that there are too many terms in cricket to remember all of them. When I asked my
vice-captain, Niket Gupta the same question, he said, “I know almost 90% of the terms.
It is very tough to know all the terms since you don’t use many of these terms
regularly.” Gupta meant that since many terms aren’t used that frequently, many
people don’t bother learning them. An ideal cricket team consists of 11 players in each
team. The field is oval or round in shape and is played on a surface known as a pitch.
There are wickets on either side of the pitch. There is a bowler who bowls to a batsman.
The team who scores more runs during the match wins. This talks about Swales’ second
and third criteria. Swales’ second criterion states that a discourse community has
mechanisms of intercommunication among its members where as Swales’ third criterion
states that a discourse community has its own lexis. (Swales 472-473)
To become a member of this team, you basically have to go for try-outs. After
you become a member of the team, there are no different levels of membership. There
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is just a base fee of $23 for basic amenities such as jerseys, cricket bats and wickets.
There is just one level of membership in this club. However, there is a specific structure
to the team. There is one captain who makes all the decisions (Venkat) and a vicecaptain (Gupta) who helps the captain make all the decisions. The rest of the team
members have equal status and they have to follow the captain. To retain your spot in
the team, you have to attend all the practices religiously. If you skip more than three
practices, there will be a team meeting to decide whether you are still a part of the
team. This satisfies Swales’ fourth criterion, which states that a discourse community
has a threshold level of members. (Swales 473) At the end of each practice session, the
team sits together for fifteen minutes and we discuss the strengths and weaknesses that
we observed during the practice games. This feedback we receive from one another
enables us to do better during each practice session and it helps to achieve our ultimate
goal, which is to win the trophy. This addresses Swales’ fifth criteria, which states that a
discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide
information and feedback. (Swales 473)
I used Observations as one of my sources. Since we had a practice last Friday at
the Armory, I observed everything I could. People who don’t know the game won’t
understand the terminology used by cricketers. I also noticed that the captain of the
team was making all the decisions regarding who was going to bat, who was going to
bowl etc. There was a lot of cheering for the bowlers. Through this assignment, I
realized how passionate a sport cricket is. Although there are six criteria in Swales’
article about discourse communities, I chose to write on five of them. Five of the six
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criteria strongly relate to the discourse community I was writing about and I decided to
go in depth about the five criteria. I chose to write on the lexis of my discourse
community, the different level of members, the intercommunications among the
members, common goals my discourse community has and the use of participatory
mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. All these characteristics
definitely make PUCC a discourse community. As my vice-captain Gupta said, “Winning
is the most important thing in a competitive sport like this.” We try to go out and give
our best every weekend. I am looking forward to playing with The Pistons throughout
my four years here at Purdue.
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Works Cited:
Gupta, Niket. Personal interview. 26 October 2013.
Purdue University Cricket Club. CricHQ. May 2012. Web. 23 October 2013.
Shah, Mishank. “Cricket- The Game.” 2013. JPEG file.
Swales, John. “The Concept of Discourse Community.” Writing About Writing: A College
Reader. Ed. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011.
466-479. Print.
The Pistons. Personal Observation. 25 October 2013.
Venkat, Ashwin. Personal interview. 23 October 2013.