The May 18 evidentiary hearing in the USA Cricket bankruptcy ran almost the full day in Federal Judge Michael Romero’s Denver courtroom. The hearing was the central proceeding in a case that has consumed US cricket since November 2025, when USA Cricket — the sport’s national governing body, now suspended by the International Cricket Council — entered Chapter 11 protection. The court soon replaced USAC’s deadlocked board with Mark Dennis as Chapter 11 trustee. In April, Dennis filed a proposed settlement with American Cricket Enterprises (ACE), the company that operates Major League Cricket and holds USA Cricket’s 50-year commercial license. The settlement would resolve ACE’s $150 million breach-of-contract claim against USAC, withdraw the parties’ pending litigation in California arbitration and Colorado state court, and provide funding for USA Cricket to emerge from bankruptcy. Five parties filed objections; the May 18 hearing was the court’s first close examination of the settlement and the trustee’s process for reaching it.
Two witnesses took the stand: trustee Mark Dennis, who spent most of the day being examined and cross-examined; and Johnny Grave, CEO of ACE, who followed in the afternoon. A third witness — former USA Cricket CEO Johnathan Atkeison — was scheduled to testify but had to leave mid-afternoon due to a family emergency. Romero set closing arguments for Tuesday, May 26 at 2:30 PM. He will rule after that.
What follows captures the hearing’s main currents — the testimony, the objections, and the lines of argument the court will be weighing. It is not an evaluation of how those questions will land.
The narrow question Romero kept returning to
From the opening exchanges through the afternoon, Romero repeatedly steered the proceeding back to a single question: whether Mark Dennis exercised reasonable business judgment in negotiating the settlement with ACE.
That framing was not new — Romero set it at the May 6 hearing — but its consequence became clearer on May 18 as objectors tried to widen the inquiry. When NCL counsel Daniel Glasser pressed for testimony on whether the High Performance Center at Grand Prairie actually meets the criteria for a high-performance training facility, Romero cut him off. “It really doesn’t matter,” the judge said. “It goes back to what Mr. Dennis looked at to satisfy whether it had been or not.” The question, Romero said, was “do we have a breach here that’s terribly obvious — in other words, could the trustee, by the exercise of minimal diligence, figure out whether ACE was or wasn’t in breach.”
That phrase — minimal diligence — captures what May 18 was about. Not whether the contract is good for USA Cricket. Not whether ACE has performed. Not whether the underlying disputes could be won by either side. The question was whether Dennis, having investigated those things to the depth he did, made a reasonable judgment in choosing to settle.
What Trustee Mark Dennis did, and what objectors said he didn’t
On direct examination, Dennis walked through his investigation. He reviewed ACE’s proof of claim and arbitration demand, the parties’ breach correspondence, the two prior settlement letters (February 2024 and June 2024), and the ICC’s reinstatement-conditions document. He spoke with Johnny Grave and Christopher White on the ACE side; with Sesha Kalapatapu and Jonathan Atkeison on the USA Cricket side; and weekly with three ICC contacts.
On the disputed $1.2 million USAC says ACE owes it, Dennis described a specific investigation. Mr. Pisike had sent him invoices in November, characterizing them as “informal.” Dennis cross-checked those invoices against USA Cricket’s audited financials and accounting records. The books showed about $645,000 in total accounts receivable, of which only $60,000 was attributable to ACE. ACE’s position was that everything it had approved had been paid. Dennis’s conclusion: the claims are “subject to dispute and not as clear-cut as the objections suggest.”
Glasser, on cross, pressed on what Dennis had not done. He had not visited any stadiums. He had not independently verified ACE’s claimed $150 million in investment. He had not hired investment bankers, conducted a formal market test for alternative financing, or built a litigation budget. He had not moved to test the size of the ACE claim through the procedures available for doing so. He had not seen the precise terms of ACE’s last pre-trustee settlement offer — though Kalapatapu would later represent, in an offer of proof, that those earlier terms were “significantly better” than what ACE has now agreed to.
Dennis’s response was that those paths weren’t worth the cost. “This case has been characterized by disagreements at every step,” he said. “There are 50 different issues out there. I had a chance to go down the path of investigating this one — but if I did, I’d have to investigate all of them. It’s just not commercially feasible.” Asked how much cash the estate had on hand, Dennis answered: “$35,000 right now.”
The $150 million claim
Glasser’s most sustained line of argument concerned the $150 million claim. He pressed Dennis on whether he had attempted to value it, whether he had asked ACE to substantiate it, whether he had considered procedures to size the claim lower for plan-confirmation purposes.
The answers were uniform: no formal valuation, no expert work, no procedural motion, and a settlement that releases USA Cricket’s affirmative defenses without any court ruling on them. “None of the affirmative defenses the debtor asserted have been resolved by a court, have they?” Glasser asked. “No,” Dennis answered. “But the settlement, if it’s approved, all the debtor’s affirmative defenses and claims will be forever released?” “Yes.”
Dennis’s defense turned on a different point. Even if the claim were cut to 5 percent of its face value, he said, ACE would still be the largest creditor and would still hold what the bankruptcy bar calls a blocking position on any plan. Litigation would burn time and money the estate doesn’t have, with an uncertain outcome — and at the end of it, the same problem would remain.
Glasser’s counter, never resolved, was that the alternative offers — particularly NCL’s — proposed to fund exactly that litigation. The objection wasn’t that Dennis should have litigated alone. It was that he hadn’t seriously tested whether a funded litigation path could have worked.
Where the settlement payment actually goes
Glasser also walked Dennis through the math on what the $340,000 settlement payment — the cash component of the deal, paid by ACE into an escrow to satisfy creditor and administrative claims — actually delivers. The numbers came directly from Dennis.
Trustee fees, calculated under the statutory formula on disbursements, were budgeted at approximately $50,000. Dennis’s professional firm, Davis Graham & Stubbs, was committed at approximately $240,000. That leaves around $60,000 of the $340,000 available for actual pre-petition creditor claims — though Dennis testified the full pre-petition claims pool he is working with was initially around $700,000, including unpaid 2024 player contracts and other obligations, and that he is in active negotiation to reduce some of those amounts.
“So how much do you expect creditors to receive in relation to their claims?” Glasser asked. “We’re talking pennies on the dollar?” Dennis answered that his objective was a “pay in full” plan in which all creditors get paid, achieved by negotiating reductions and ultimately drawing on future revenue from the reassumed term sheet. ACE’s counsel objected on the ground that the case has not yet reached the plan-confirmation stage. But the math on the cash component itself was on the record by then: most of the $340,000 is going to the professionals administering the case, not to the creditors the settlement is nominally designed to pay.
The ICC: refused to fund, then tried to be heard
The most consequential thread of the day was the ICC’s role.
Dennis testified that one of his first acts as Chapter 11 trustee was to approach the ICC for debtor-in-possession financing. The ICC declined. Only after that refusal did ACE step in as the financing source. Grave confirmed the sequence from the ACE side: ACE had originally expected the ICC to be the DIP lender; when that didn’t materialize, ACE “significantly” increased what it was willing to commit. The settlement that emerged exists in the shape it does in part because the ICC chose not to fund a reorganization whose conditions the ICC itself had set.
Then, in the afternoon, the ICC tried something striking. Daniel Desatnik of Proskauer Rose — the same firm whose David Weiss had told the court at the May 6 hearing that the ICC “takes no position” on the motions — attempted to cross-examine Dennis. The aim, in Desatnik’s framing, was to clarify that USA Cricket’s path into bankruptcy was not the ACE agreement but USAC’s termination of it and the ICC’s subsequent suspension of USAC’s membership.
ACE counsel Amalia Sax-Bolder objected first, on the ground that the ICC had no standing to participate. Her objection drew a notable concession from Desatnik. “Even though we are not taking a position opposed to the deal,” he told the court, “we are still in essence a third-party beneficiary in some respects to this settlement.” The settlement is expressly contingent on satisfying ICC’s reinstatement conditions — so the ICC, while not aligned with any party, had a stake in the record being accurate.
Glasser then objected on different grounds. The ICC had not filed an objection, not filed a joinder, not designated a witness. If the ICC had wanted to participate, he argued, the trustee could have designated someone, or counsel could have identified a witness whom the objectors could then cross-examine on ICC’s position. Instead, the ICC was attempting to provide what amounted to hearsay testimony through questions of another witness. “Had I known the ICC was going to chime in and take a position, having said they take no position, I would have prepared my trial presentation differently,” he told Romero. “This is completely blindsiding me.” Romero sustained the objection. Desatnik could remain in the courtroom (virtually) but could not question witnesses.
The exchange was significant beyond the procedural ruling. The ICC’s public stance has been one of strategic neutrality. Desatnik’s attempted intervention — and the third-party-beneficiary framing he reached for — suggested that the ICC’s actual posture is more involved than its public stance has indicated. Throughout the day, the trustee’s and ACE’s lawyers tried to introduce the substance of Dennis’s ICC discussions and the ICC’s reinstatement conditions as evidence of what Dennis had relied on. The objectors objected on hearsay grounds each time. Romero allowed the reinstatement-conditions document in “on a very, very limited basis,” not for its truth but for the fact that Dennis had reviewed it. The specifics of the ICC’s position were largely kept out of the record.
The two alternative proposals
Dennis was asked about two competing financing approaches.
The first, from the United States Premier League, came during Dennis’s earlier service as the case’s subchapter V trustee. Routed through an entity called Offbeat Media (the parent company of the USPL), the proposal contemplated an interest-bearing loan to USAC conditioned on a strategic partnership with USPL. Dennis testified the structural conditions made it difficult to achieve and that he did not view it as a viable financing route.
The second was from the National Cricket League, the entity chaired by Arun Agarwal that has been the most vocal objector. Dennis recounted receiving NCL’s initial proposal in late April — with two options, neither of which he found viable — and then a fourth, more substantial offer late Friday or Saturday. That offer included $2 million in 2026, additional amounts marked TBD in later years, and a marked-up term sheet proposing what Dennis described as “dramatic changes.” The latest offer, Dennis said, was “incomplete” — the terms beyond 2026 were not nailed down — and didn’t solve the fundamental problem of ACE’s claim and blocking position.
Glasser’s counter was that Dennis’s logic effectively immunized the settlement from any competing offer. No offer that didn’t pre-resolve ACE’s claim could clear the bar Dennis had set; no offer that did could be made by anyone other than ACE itself.
Sesha Kalapatapu’s points: ‘commercially reasonable’ and the asymmetric release
Late in the cross, Sesha Kalapatapu — appearing pro se as a creditor and former USA Cricket general counsel — raised two points that hadn’t surfaced before.
The first concerned a single phrase: “commercially reasonable efforts.” The term sits at the heart of the parties’ dispute over stadium construction, because Section 5.1 of the term sheet required ACE to make “commercially reasonable efforts” to build six stadiums by end of 2025 — and what those efforts should have looked like has been one of the most contested questions in the litigation. Kalapatapu walked Dennis to the witness’s own concession that the term is “difficult to define” and “not black and white,” then pointed out that Dennis had nonetheless used the very same phrase in Section 4(H) of the settlement agreement, where USA Cricket commits to “commercially reasonable efforts” to pursue ICC reinstatement. “You are aware that USAC and ACE have a dispute over the meaning of the term commercially reasonable,” Kalapatapu said. “And yet you have put that term in a settlement agreement with ACE.” Dennis acknowledged he had not defined the term for purposes of the settlement.
The second point concerned the structure of the release. The settlement contains a mutual release of claims between ACE and USA Cricket, and a mutual non-disparagement provision carrying $100,000 in liquidated damages per material breach. But the release contains a carve-out: it does not extend to direct claims ACE may hold against current or former USA Cricket directors. Kalapatapu asked Dennis why that asymmetry existed. Dennis answered he could not speak to what those claims might be.
The implication was substantial. If approved, the settlement would bind the suspended directors — Pisike, Balusu, Salver, and others — to a non-disparagement provision while leaving them potentially exposed to direct claims ACE could bring against them as individuals. The people most affected by the non-disparagement clause are the same people whom ACE has not agreed to release.
The term sheet, reinstated
Both Glasser and Kalapatapu probed the same fundamental question by different routes: why reassume an agreement that has been the source of nearly continuous dispute since 2021?
Glasser walked Dennis through a sequence of breach letters and prior settlements — January 2022, January 2024, February 2024, June 2024, June 2025 — to establish, as Dennis acknowledged, “a consistent pattern of issues regarding interpretation of the contract between USA Cricket and ACE from at least 2021 through the summer of 2025.” The settlement does not amend the term sheet. It commits the parties to negotiate a long-form agreement “in good faith” — language that replaced an earlier proposal from Dennis for a year-end 2026 deadline, which ACE rejected.
Grave was asked about that rejection. He explained he had pushed back on a deadline because a newly constituted USA Cricket board would need time to understand the contractual mechanics before being asked to commit to a long-form deal. Pressed by Glasser later, Dennis acknowledged the implication: ACE has no obligation to negotiate a long-form agreement that varies the economic or structural terms of the existing term sheet. “That appears to be the case.”
Glasser’s framing was direct and provided one of the most dramatic moments of the day’s hearing.
After Dennis testified on direct that the settlement would give USA Cricket a “fresh start” — “which is the purpose of Chapter 11,” Dennis added — Glasser picked the phrase up on cross. “The fresh start is the exact same deal that got the debtor into bankruptcy in the first place,” he said. “You’re literally signing the exact same terms that put this debtor in bankruptcy.” After an objection from Sax-Bolder on the ground that the question was argumentative, Glasser rephrased: “Are you signing the exact same terms that put this debtor in bankruptcy in the first place? You’re affirming the term sheet that has existed since 2019.”
“That’s step one, yes, this is that.” Dennis replied.
“And it didn’t work out the first seven years,” Glasser replied, “but creditors should just assume that it’s going to work out now.”
On that note, Glasser ended his questioning of Dennis.
What May 26 will weigh
Closing arguments on Tuesday will distill the day’s testimony into the question Romero has framed throughout: whether Mark Dennis exercised reasonable business judgment in arriving at the settlement now before the court. The standard is deferential, and is a high bar for the objectors to overcome. It does not require Dennis to have made the best possible decision, or to have investigated every avenue. It requires him to have done enough.
The objectors will argue that what Dennis did is short of enough — that the absence of a claim valuation, the absence of a market test for alternative financing, and the asymmetric release of director claims add up to a settlement reached before its alternatives were tested. Dennis will argue that those steps were not commercially feasible given the estate’s $35,000 in cash, that none would have changed the fundamental problem of ACE’s blocking position, and that the deal he negotiated provides USA Cricket its only path to ICC reinstatement and emergence from bankruptcy.
Romero will rule after closing. What May 18 made clear is that whatever he decides, he will decide on a narrow question — and one critical party, the ICC, will not have been heard on it at all.
