The Bay Area’s newest professional team unveiled its name and logo on Friday as the San Francisco Unicorns prepared for the inaugural Major League Cricket season.
The Unicorns will wear orange, light blue and dark blue, with their colors representing the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean.
“The Bay Area is home to exceptionally talented people and companies that have changed the world. The term Unicorn has been used in popular culture to denote exceptional talent or potential, whether it be a sportsperson or a Silicon Valley startup,” lead investors Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan said. “Our San Francisco Unicorns have a fittingly extraordinary opportunity to represent all the fans of the world’s second-largest sport in the Bay Area.”
While the Unicorns are representing San Francisco, their inaugural season won’t be played in SF, or anywhere in the Bay Area or Northern California at all. The inaugural Major League Cricket season will be played in the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie, Texas, between Dallas and Arlington. The league is redeveloping Grand Prairie Stadium, a former minor league baseball stadium, into a 7,000-seat cricket ground.
The season will be played from July 13-30, with each team playing five regular season games. Major League Cricket plays 20 matches, which take roughly three hours, as opposed to dayslong test matches.
Two of the other members of the six-team league, the Seattle Orcas and Washington Freedom, have unveiled their names and logos. Dallas, Los Angeles and New York have yet to do so. The Unicorns will acquire their first players this Sunday through the Domestic Player Draft.
While the Unicorns will play their inaugural season nearly 2,000 miles away from their namesake city, there are plans to build a cricket oval that could seat up to 15,000 people at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds in San Jose, capitalizing on the sport’s popularity among the South Asian community.
Cricket requires far larger fields than any American sport; the sport’s smallest fields are usually 150 yards wide, too large for existing baseball or football stadiums to accommodate. Building a cricket stadium in the Bay Area could also open up opportunities to host Australian rules football, which uses a similar field.