Two critical filings landed in the USA Cricket bankruptcy case the day before the May 6 status hearing in Denver. One came from Mark Dennis. The other came from American Cricket Enterprises.
Dennis is the court-appointed Chapter 11 Trustee for USA Cricket. When USA Cricket filed for bankruptcy in November 2025, and the paralysis of its divided board became an issue, the court replaced the governing body’s board of directors as the decisionmakers for the entity with Dennis as the trustee — a neutral fiduciary whose job is to make decisions on behalf of the estate, including whether and how to settle outstanding disputes. Decisions that would ordinarily belong to USA Cricket’s board right now belong to Dennis. ACE is the long-term commercial licensee of USA Cricket, operating Major League Cricket and holding the contractual relationship — the Binding Term Sheet — that sits at the center of the dispute.
Dennis’s filing is his account of why he accepted ACE’s proposed settlement rather than pursuing the litigation that USA Cricket’s previous leadership had been moving toward, and also presumably why he did not seek or secure another entity to bail out USA Cricket.
ACE’s filing is its rebuttal to the specific factual allegations raised about its performance under the contract. Together, the two filings are the most detailed picture yet of the case both parties will defend at the evidentiary hearing now scheduled for May 18.
Both filings also respond to a set of seven objections filed by the court’s May 4 deadline. The objectors include Venu Pisike, chairman of the suspended USA Cricket board; Anj Balusu and Srinivas Salver, two suspended USA Cricket Directors; Sesha Kalapatapu, USA Cricket’s former Counsel, filing pro se as a creditor; and the National Cricket League (NCL), a separate league venture chaired by Arun Agarwal that has put forward a competing financial proposal. At the May 6 status hearing, Judge Michael E. Romero ruled that Pisike and Kalapatapu have full standing to participate at the May 18 hearing, that NCL may cross-examine the trustee in a limited capacity on the question of alternative financing, and that Balusu and Salver may state their positions but not cross-examine witnesses.
What follows lays out the key issues those filings put on the record — the questions the May 18 hearing will have to work through, and where each sits in the documentary record now before the court. It is not an evaluation of how the questions will land in court, or of the merits of the objections they respond to.
What the trustee says he investigated
Approving a bankruptcy settlement requires the court to assess the strength of the underlying disputes the settlement would resolve. That makes the trustee’s evaluation of ACE’s $150 million breach-of-contract claim, USA Cricket’s potential counterclaims, and the parties’ disputes over performance the central inquiry of the May 18 hearing. The trustee’s filing is his first detailed account, on the public record, of what that evaluation looked like.
On the roughly $1.2 million in payments several objections cite as owed by ACE to USA Cricket, Dennis says he “thoroughly investigated” the underlying allegations, reviewing the contractual provisions, the payment history, and the parties’ competing interpretations. He concluded that “USAC’s claims to the $1.2 million are subject to dispute and not as clear-cut as the Objections suggest.” ACE, he writes, “would vigorously contest that it owes the money and would continue to do so if the settlement were denied. Even if USAC’s prior management believed that the claims were valid, this litigation with ACE would be expensive and uncertain in outcome.”
On the structure of the settlement, the filing argues that the mutual release of claims serves as the cure mechanism the bankruptcy code requires. “In requesting approval of the Settlement Agreement and the assumption of the Binding Term Sheet, the Trustee is not simply rolling over and accepting ACE’s claim,” the filing states. “He is resolving it through settlement, which is precisely the purpose” of the rule that governs bankruptcy compromises.”
These are the framings the trustee will be cross-examined on May 18. Judge Romero said at the May 6 hearing that the question is, in his words, “what did Mr. Dennis know, and when did he know it” — a narrow inquiry into whether the trustee exercised reasonable business judgment. The trustee’s own account of his investigation is what that inquiry will be measured against.
The Dennis–Agarwal correspondence, on the record
The most substantive new addition to the record is an attached six-page email chain between Dennis, NCL chairman Arun Agarwal, and former USA Cricket CEO Jonathan Atkeison. The exchange is now public, and the chronology it documents will be among the questions the May 18 hearing weighs.
The chain opens on March 17, 2026, with an email from Atkeison — then USA Cricket’s CEO — to both Dennis and Agarwal. The subject line is “Introduction.” Atkeison wrote: “Arun Agarwal of the National Cricket League (NCL), please meet Mark Dennis, the court appointed trustee for USA Cricket. As promised, I wanted to make an introduction, and see if it was possible to facilitate a conversation.”
The next email in the chain is dated April 20 — thirty-four days later, and seven days after Dennis filed the motion to approve the settlement with ACE. Agarwal’s email opens: “Thanks for your work for Cricket in America. If you allow me, we have few queries kindly. Reason for asking this is that we are exploring to make a proposal to honorable court to consider please.” He then walks through the financial structure of the trustee’s motion and asks specific questions about the cash payment, the bridge financing, and the exit loan.
Dennis responded the same day with inline answers. Agarwal replied that afternoon, citing legal consultations on potential antitrust concerns, and asking whether there was “a dollar amount consideration to counter ACE proposal, which will make you consider our proposal.”
Dennis’s response the following afternoon is the substantive one. Any alternative proposal from NCL, he wrote, “will likely result in litigation with ACE (i.e. over its $150mm claim and other matters that pre-date my involvement), causing the time frame in bankruptcy and expenses to necessarily increase, likely significantly.” Given USA Cricket’s roughly $35,000 in cash on hand at that point, “any proposal from NCL and/or other parties would need to include a commitment to fund USAC’s share of these litigation costs in full” — in addition to USA Cricket’s operating expenses through bankruptcy and the cost of emerging from it.
In the body of his filing, Dennis describes his engagement with NCL as having occurred “for the past two weeks” — from roughly April 21 forward. The March 17 introduction does not appear in that characterization. What happened in the five weeks between Atkeison’s introduction and Agarwal’s first substantive email — whether Agarwal attempted to reach Dennis earlier, whether the trustee received those approaches, whether the gap was a function of timing on either side — is not addressed in the filing.
That gap is the kind of question Romero said the May 18 hearing would weigh. NCL’s lawyers told the court at the May 6 hearing that they wanted Agarwal available to testify about the existence of alternative financing sources. Romero said cross-examination on what Dennis knew, and when, would be permitted. The April 20 emails establish what was said once contact was made. What is not on the record — and what May 18 may bring out — is what happened in the period before that.
ACE’s performance record
ACE’s filing is the more documentary of the two. Where the trustee’s reply is largely argumentative, ACE attached five exhibits and walked through specific factual allegations in the objections one by one.
On the High Performance Center, which Venu Pisike’s objection had alleged ACE failed to construct, citing instead a Prairie View, Texas facility: ACE locates the High Performance Center at its stadium in Grand Prairie, near Dallas. The Term Sheet, the filing notes, gives ACE “sole and final discretion” over the design and development of the facility. ACE describes Grand Prairie as including eight centered turf wickets, twelve practice wickets, broadcast-quality lighting, locker rooms with ice baths, and full-time ground staff. The filing also points to USA Cricket’s own 2020 Annual Report, which described the Grand Prairie stadium as “likely to become the future home of USA Cricket and a High Performance Centre,” and to an April 2025 site visit by USA Cricket’s CEO and the men’s and women’s head coaches, none of whom raised objections at the time.
On the stadium development obligation, ACE provides a scorecard. It owns and operates Grand Prairie, built at a cost of $22 million. It holds an exclusive license at Church Street Park in Morrisville, North Carolina, with $1.5 million invested. It secured special-event agreements with Oakland Coliseum and Broward County Stadium in Lauderhill for the 2025 MLC season, with more than $1 million invested in 2025 to develop cricket facilities at those venues. Five further stadiums are in development — including the Pomona venue near Los Angeles, which received final city approval last September and will host cricket at the LA28 Olympics.
On the absence of a National Team sponsor at the 2026 ICC event — which Anj Balusu’s objection had cited as evidence of commercialization failure — ACE offers a different account. USA Cricket was under ICC suspension at the time, and the commercial rights had reverted from ACE back to the ICC. ACE nonetheless, the filing states, “facilitated a six-figure sponsor for the USA Men’s National Team, with funds flowing to the ICC to support high-performance programs.”
On the pre-2023 payments Pisike’s objection had questioned: ACE describes three advances made at USA Cricket’s request — $150,000 in December 2021 for a Cricket Ireland tour of the United States, signed by then-USA Cricket director Suraj Viswanathan; $300,000 in June 2022 to settle a bonus claim from former CEO Iain Higgins, signed by then-Chairman Paraag Marathe; and roughly $99,000 in late 2021 toward bid costs for the 2024 ICC T20 World Cup. Each, ACE says, was documented in a signed letter. The total of roughly $549,000 was advanced as accommodation rather than required obligation, and $450,000 of it was forgiven at year-end 2023 — “at the request of Mr. Pisike himself.”
The contested accounting method
The single most consequential document ACE attached to its filing is a settlement letter agreement dated June 25, 2024, between ACE and USA Cricket. It is consequential not because of the dispute it resolved, but because of an acknowledgment buried inside it — one that sits at the heart of the parties’ current disagreement over whether ACE has met its minimum payment obligations to the USA National Teams.
The letter resolved a then-active dispute over USA Cricket–incurred expenses for National Team activities ACE had not pre-approved, including a May 2024 bilateral series against Bangladesh held at the Prairie View Cricket Complex in Houston and a related series against Canada. USA Cricket had organized the activities and sought reimbursement after the fact; ACE had taken the position that prior approval was required under the Term Sheet. The parties settled in June 2024 for $502,000 — $233,000 in reimbursement that ACE considered reasonable and $269,000 as a good-faith payment toward USA Men’s National Team player, coach, and support staff costs.
The acknowledgment that matters for May 18 is this: in the same letter, USA Cricket agreed that “the contract value of the Player Agreements … counts toward ACE’s obligations under the Binding Term Sheet with respect to the cumulative annual contract salary payments for players, coaches, and support staff.” In plain terms, USA Cricket agreed that the salaries ACE pays USA-eligible players through their Major League Cricket contracts can be counted toward the $1.2 million annual minimum the Term Sheet requires ACE to spend on National Team personnel. The letter is signed by Pisike on June 25, 2024, in his capacity as Chairman of USA Cricket.
An annexure to the letter lists fourteen players whose MLC contract values ACE counted toward the minimum: Corey Anderson, Andries Gous, Ali Khan, Harmeet Singh, and Steven Taylor at $75,000 each; Nosthush Kenjige, Nitish Kumar, Milind Kumar, Saurabh Netravalkar, and Monank Patel at $40,000 each; smaller amounts for others. ACE argues that the methodology Pisike’s current objection characterizes as an “accounting trick” is the same methodology USA Cricket agreed to in writing — and that Pisike himself signed.
USA Cricket’s current leadership presumably disputes that reading. The objections collectively raise a structural critique of the Term Sheet’s design — that USA Cricket’s reliance on ACE for the funds that constitute most of its operating revenue creates a dynamic in which any contractual concession by USA Cricket reflects ACE’s leverage as much as USA Cricket’s agreement. Read against that critique, a settlement signed by USA Cricket to resolve a payment dispute is not a clean contractual concession; it is the product of a negotiation in which one side controls the funds the other needs to function.
That argument is a structural critique of the Term Sheet itself, distinct from any specific factual dispute over performance. It sits in the background of the documentary record ACE has put on the docket, and it is one of the questions the May 18 hearing will have to work through — both as a matter of how the court reads the June 2024 letter, and as a matter of how it weighs the broader claim that the contract creates a dynamic in which contractual concessions cannot be cleanly separated from operational pressure.
The “no rights to convey” argument
Beyond the specific factual rebuttals, the trustee’s reply makes one structural argument that goes directly at the foundation of NCL’s competing-bid objection.
NCL had framed the Term Sheet as a valuable asset — “these media rights alone could be worth billions” over fifty years — that the trustee was effectively giving away to ACE without testing the market. The trustee’s response: “USAC currently has no rights to convey. USAC’s ICC membership is suspended. Without active ICC sanctioning, USAC cannot host cricket events, manage national teams, or license any form of cricket in the United States. The very rights that NCL characterizes as valuable do not presently exist in a form that the estate can monetize or transfer to anyone.”
NCL’s own freestanding alternative offer — the proposal that doesn’t depend on ACE’s participation — conditions its $450,000 settlement payment on “lifting of ICC suspension.” NCL acknowledges, in other words, that the rights are valuable only upon reinstatement. “If the rights are valuable only upon reinstatement,” the trustee’s filing states, “then the relevant question is which path most reliably delivers reinstatement, and the answer is the ACE settlement, which resolves the disputes that are a precondition to reinstatement, provides immediate funding to sustain the estate through the process, and commits ACE to support reinstatement efforts through the end of 2026.”
The trustee separately confirms that the alternative three-party deal NCL had proposed — between ACE, NCL, and USA Cricket — had not gained traction in discussions between ACE and NCL. As of the May 5 filings, only NCL’s freestanding offer remained, and the trustee argues it is not a viable alternative.
What May 18 will and will not decide
Several of the objections — most explicitly those filed by Pisike and Kalapatapu — argue that the Term Sheet itself is incompatible with USA Cricket’s status as a nonprofit, with its obligations as an ICC member, and with the antitrust framework that governs market exclusivity in American sport. The trustee’s filing addresses these arguments only by noting they fall outside the scope of the inquiry. ACE’s filing makes the same move more directly, describing the arguments as “collateral attacks” that are “outside the scope” of what the May 18 hearing is about.
That framing matters for what the hearing will and will not decide. Romero set a narrow scope: whether Dennis exercised reasonable business judgment in negotiating the settlement, with particular attention to whether he adequately tested alternative financing. The standard the court will apply asks whether the settlement is fair, equitable, and in the best interests of the estate. It does not ask whether the underlying Term Sheet is good policy, or whether it would survive a properly brought antitrust challenge, or whether its structure is consistent with the autonomy obligations of an Olympic-pathway national governing body. Those are different questions for different forums.
The trustee’s position on this issue is clear: the Term Sheet has been in place for nearly seven years. No antitrust action has been brought. No formal ruling on its compatibility with the Ted Stevens Act has been issued. The parties have litigated performance and termination rather than the validity of the underlying license. In the bankruptcy court, what is on the record is that the contract has functioned as the framework of US cricket’s commercial architecture for the entirety of its current era, and that USA Cricket’s emergence path runs through it.
The counterpoint — that the contract may still face antitrust or nonprofit-law challenges, brought by the right plaintiff in the right forum, and that the structural dependence the contract creates between USA Cricket and ACE is itself one of the issues a properly constituted board may need to revisit in the long-form negotiation the settlement contemplates — does not affect the May 18 calculus. Even if arguably it should – because the non-resolution of those issues may be a recipe for all parties ending up in this same place once again.
What May 18 will weigh is what the trustee did: whether his investigation of ACE’s $150 million claim was reasonable; whether his evaluation of USA Cricket’s counterclaims was reasonable; whether the financing he secured was the best available given the constraints. And whether the time he spent engaging with NCL — and the thirty-four-day gap before that engagement began — represented adequate market testing under the standard the court will apply.
The case the trustee and ACE put on the record on May 5 is the case they will defend on May 18.
