Ankit Panchal is perfectly happy now with his life in the United States.

For more than a year the international student from the Indian state of Gujarat has been enrolled in the Green River Community College air traffic control program.

“It’s pretty good here,” Panchal, 19, said. “Everything is different here. The way people are, the way they treat us. They treat us better than in India.”

But until last April, something was missing.

For most of his life Panchal has followed and played cricket, the national sport of India.

“In India, each and every kid, almost 100 percent play,” Panchal said. “In the streets or on a field, every school, every city has a team. Every state and every village has a team, right up to the Indian national team.”

Until this year, Panchal has had no outlet for his love of cricket.

But that all changed, courtesy of Dr. Barry Bannister, Green River’s Director of International Development.

Bannister, a native Australian, also grew up playing and following cricket. After several years working in international education in Southeast Asia, India and the Middle East, including stints at colleges in Kuwait and Hong Kong, Bannister found himself in Auburn.

“I’ve kind of lived the dream of the expatriate,” he said. “Then I moved here and married a local girl.”

Last year Bannister was a part of a contingent of Green River administrators in India exploring the possibility of attracting students to Green River.

“When we were there at this time last year, I was there with the vice president of the international program, and one night after dinner I said, ‘We’re going shopping,’ ” Bannister said. “And I bought two cricket kits. When we got back, I had a couple of Indian boys come up and say, ‘I heard you have some cricket gear.’ ”

One of those boys was Panchal.

“Barry Bannister, he brought some equipment, and he asked me if I played,” Panchal said. “And we decided to make a team. So I asked a couple of friends.”

Soon, the club sport, with Panchal as president, attracted enough players to form a team and join the Northwest Cricket League (NCL).

“And that was it, we had a cricket team,” Bannister said.

Often credited as the forerunner of baseball, cricket bears a few similarities to the American pastime. Both sports feature a batter trying to hit a thrown ball and scoring points by running bases, but in cricket, 11 players take the field instead of nine.

In cricket, two batters hit for the offensive team, trying to score runs by hitting the ball with flat-sided bats. The action takes place on a field, or oval. In the middle of the field a 22-yard pitch features two wickets, three posts stuck in the ground and topped with wooden bails that fall when the posts are disturbed. The wickets are targets for the bowlers, who score points for hitting them with a thrown ball. The batters not only try to score runs by hitting the bowled ball, they defend the wickets from attack by the bowlers. When a ball is hit into play, in any direction, the batsmen score runs by running between the wickets. The bowlers and the team in the field try to dismiss the batters by hitting the wickets or catching a hit ball in the air.

Unlike baseball, the ball is typically delivered to the batter on the bounce, and batters hit the ball with an underhanded motion. Bowled cricket balls can often reach speeds of 90 or 100 miles per hour.

“We played the shorter version of the game, the 20/20 version,” Bannister said. “And I was pretty happy with our performance. A lot of the guys in the league said we did a good job. The other teams are from Boeing and Microsoft, and other places like that. We also made one trip to Oregon and were lucky enough to win that game.”

“Our team was pretty new, but we didn’t do too bad,” Panchal said of the team’s foray into the NCL.

Although the team did not post a victory during most of the season, it did defeat a team in Oregon to close out the inaugural campaign.

“It was a big victory for us, we won by nine wickets,” Panchal said. “We had lost eight games in a row. The team in Portland was tough but still we won.”

With the foundation of the team firmly established, Panchal said he was looking forward to future seasons.

“We’re going to play every summer,” he said. “We’re going to start up again in April.”

Although this year’s squad featured international students only, Bannister said he hoped to entice other students to try out this season.

Panchal said that the skills necessary to play the game well aren’t hard to acquire if the athlete is willing to put in the work.

“If you play a game every week and practice and join a team … it’s the same as learning baseball.”

In addition to providing international students already at the school a chance to play their national sport, Bannister said the school was using the sport as a draw for future students.

“We’re flooding India with this at the moment,” he said. “We’re telling them, you can come to the U.S., which is where they all want to come, and go to school and play cricket.

“Because cricket is the national sport of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, it’s a natural to draw international students to the school,” he said. “It’s also a tool to attract and retain students.”

Bannister said that in addition to drawing the students, the sport also helps break down barriers between students from countries that have a traditional animosity towards each other, such as India and Pakistan.

“When I put together this cricket team, I wanted to include some Pakistani students as well,” Bannister added. “And as it’s turned out, we’ve been able to include both Pakistani and Indians on the same team. And I don’t see that on many other teams.”