USA Cricket and American Cricket Enterprises, which had been in litigation since September 2025, have reached a proposed comprehensive settlement that would resolve their dispute in its entirety, restore the 2019 Binding Term Sheet between the two parties, and channel more than $1.1 million of ACE funding into the national governing body’s bankruptcy estate to cover both administrative costs and a path out of Chapter 11.
The settlement was signed and filed in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Colorado on April 13 by Chapter 11 trustee Mark D. Dennis, who was installed in mid-January after Judge Michael E. Romero took the dramatic step of revoking USA Cricket’s subchapter V election and ordering the national governing body’s existing board replaced with a trustee —a move cricexec reported on at the time. The April 13 filings represent Dennis’s first major move on the commercial relationship that has defined the bankruptcy.
The settlement is not yet approved. Dennis and ACE chief executive Johnny Grave have both signed the agreement, but by its own terms it becomes effective only when Romero enters an approval order. Dennis is asking the court to do so no later than May 8. A parallel motion seeks approval of ACE’s post-petition financing on the same timeline.
If the court approves both motions, the trajectory of the case will be set: the plan of reorganization must be filed the week of May 22, with confirmation targeted for the week of June 26. Behind those milestones sits the one that actually matters — December 31, 2026, the outside date by which USA Cricket must be reinstated by the International Cricket Council or ACE, in its sole discretion, may terminate its go-forward funding commitments without liability.
A three-part financial architecture
The proposed settlement’s financial terms are built in three stages, each tied to a different phase of the bankruptcy.
First is the escrow. Within fourteen business days of the settlement’s effective date, ACE would pay $340,000 into an account controlled by the trustee. Those funds can be used only after a Chapter 11 plan goes effective, and only to pay administrative expenses that accrued before January 12, 2026 — the date the court converted the case from subchapter V and ordered a trustee appointed — and prepetition unsecured claims. If the plan fails, the money goes back to ACE.
Second is the debtor-in-possession (“DIP”) facility. Under a separate motion filed the same day, Dennis is seeking authorization to borrow up to $480,000 from ACE to fund the administration of the bankruptcy itself. The facility carries no interest, charges no fees, is unsecured, and grants ACE a superpriority administrative expense claim. Dennis’s declaration lays out why the terms look this favorable to the estate. “No traditional lender would extend credit to the Debtor on an unsecured basis,” he states, describing the organization as a nonprofit with no meaningful tangible assets, more than $150 million in claims asserted against it — most of it from ACE itself — and its only meaningful revenue source suspended indefinitely. The trustee had approached both ICC and ACE for financing; ICC declined.
Third is the exit facility. On the effective date of a confirmed plan, ACE would provide USA Cricket a senior secured credit facility of up to $796,250, which would roll in the DIP obligations and provide up to $316,250 in new money for working capital. Unlike the DIP facility, the exit facility is secured by substantially all of the reorganized debtor’s assets, subject to customary exceptions.
There is also a contingent fourth layer. If USA Cricket is reinstated by the ICC before December 31, 2026, ACE agrees to continue funding up to the maximum amounts in the exit budget — labeled Post-Reinstatement Funds in the agreement — as a substitute for a pro-rated 2026 “Direct Outlay” payment under the Binding Term Sheet. Starting in 2027, and assuming USA Cricket holds its ICC membership in good standing, ACE resumes paying the Direct Outlay and other funding obligations as the 2019 Term Sheet originally contemplated.
The undoing of a termination
The other half of the settlement is what it does to the 2019 Binding Term Sheet itself. Under the agreement, USA Cricket’s attempted termination of the contract — a saga that unfolded in stages across the summer of 2025, with a breach notice in June, a purported termination in August, a brief rescission days later, and a re-termination on September 16 — is deemed null and void and withdrawn. The trustee will formally assume the Binding Term Sheet under Section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code, making it an executory contract of the reorganized debtor going forward. There is no cure cost. The settlement itself controls the go-forward economic relationship.
ACE, for its part, would dismiss its September 2025 JAMS arbitration and the preliminary-injunction proceeding it filed in Colorado state court within five business days of the approval order. Its proof of claim for not less than $150 million — filed in December and uncontested in formal terms, though always disputed by the debtor — would be withdrawn on the same timeline. The parties exchange mutual releases, with one notable carve-out: claims ACE may hold directly against current or former USA Cricket directors or officers are preserved.
Post-emergence, the parties commit to negotiate in good faith a long-form agreement that would supersede the 2019 Binding Term Sheet. That long-form agreement, per the settlement, must “address the concerns and comments raised by ICC to ACE prepetition” — a small but telling piece of language confirming that ICC had specific objections to the original deal structure, and that those objections will need to be worked through in the next iteration of the commercial relationship.
The backdrop
The filings make the state of USA Cricket’s finances plainer than any court pleading cricexec has previously seen. When Dennis took over on January 13, USA Cricket had $46,822.62 in cash. As of the April 13 motion filing, the balance had dwindled to $34,166.31. A five-month operating budget attached to the DIP motion projects total required funding of $499,083 through June 30 — of which $385,000 is Chapter 11 reorganization costs (legal, accounting, trustee fees) and only $114,000 is going-concern operating expense. The entire budgeted USA Cricket staff through that period consists of one CEO at $7,333 per month and one membership manager at $6,700 per month.
That is the operating reality behind the legal architecture. USA Cricket was suspended from the ICC in September 2025, losing both its right to host international cricket in the United States and its primary revenue stream. It filed for subchapter V protection on October 1, had that designation revoked by the court in January, and has been under a trustee since. The settlement and the DIP facility together are the mechanism by which the trustee intends to keep the lights on, pay the professionals who will draft and confirm a plan, and position the organization to meet the ICC’s reinstatement conditions before the end of the year.
Whether it works depends on the next seven weeks, and then on the eight months after that.
cricexec will have more coverage of these developments in the coming days.
