Accommodating a Whole New Ballgame

Montgomery's Planning Board is considering a pilot program that would provide additional resources -- portable toilets, increased signage in English and Spanish and expanded police patrols -- at nine fields that have steady use by adult soccer teams, many of which include immigrants from Latin America.

The county built many of its fields in the expectation of hosting youthful soccer players and their coaches and parents for an hour or so at a time. The adult teams -- along with supporters who park, picnic and sometimes imbibe alcohol -- can stay all day.

Montgomery doesn't yet see a need for more soccer fields than baseball and softball fields, but that day is coming, said senior park planner Wallis. In the meantime, he said, "we're going to do some conversion from diamonds to rectangles."

County officials also are seeing increased demand for table tennis and badminton, generated in large part by immigrants from Asia. Members of the Potomac Country Table Tennis Club play twice a week at the Potomac Community Center, a county facility that has hosted the club since 1989.

In a gymnasium noisy with the pock and click of orange balls sent flying across green tables, Wayne Zhong surveyed 40 players hailing from Britain, China, Greece, Iran, Russia, Taiwan and Vietnam. "There are many foreigners here, and they came with their skill," he said. He added that the quality of play may not be professional but that it is "higher than Ping-Pong in the basement."

Roxroy Anderson, a Jamaican-turned-U.S. citizen who lives in Prince George's County, has spent years lobbying Montgomery officials to make room for cricket, something his county, the District and other jurisdictions did years ago. He said Wallis, the senior planner, is the first Montgomery official "who actually sat down and listened." Anderson is enthusiastic about the potential for cricket in Burtonsville.

He phrased the county's recreational quandary this way: "It's a matter of: Now I have a different makeup to my people, and do I want to reach out to everybody?"

Ellis, who happily stumbled across the cricket match near the Mall, said the sport has provided him a source of friends and helped him achieve his version of the American dream. "There is a hidden psychology in the game that channels your mind into progress," he said.

Especially in those early days, when he regretted his decision to leave his family's "huge house" in Jamaica for a "ghetto" in Langley Park, the game gave him some respite from the trials of his transition. It still does.

"It reminds me of my background," he said. "It keeps me tuned."