This evening I’m running practice for my son’s Little League T-Ball team. The regular head coach has to be somewhere else, so I’m subbing. It got me thinking of the first time I volunteered to coach a Little League team, back in 1998. I think there’s a pretty good lesson to be learned from it, although not really from anything I did, but rather, in the way I was recruited. definitely wouldn’t recommend you find volunteers this way – but there are some important lessons to be learned from this story.
A Game of Catch
I was 20. A sophomore at Northeastern University in Boston. It was a nice spring afternoon. My buddy Lazlo (not his real name, but really what we called him) and I were playing catch on the street behind our fraternity house on Mission Hill. Normally, I wouldn’t suggest playing catch on the street, but this one only had about five cars an hour, and most of those. Thanks to the miracle of Google Maps, here’s the exact spot.
After a while, a Geo Tracker came by. Trackers weren’t a good looking car in the 1990s (of course, I had no car at all, so there’s that.) A man in his early 40s rolled down the window rolled down the window, and introduced himself as Mitch from the Mission Hill Little League.
He said he’d brought his kids to the Haunted House that the fraternity ran every year (highlighted by my buddy Jeremy wielding a chain saw with the blade removed), had heard we were a bunch of good guys, and said that he needed help with coaches for the league.
Lazlo couldn’t do it, as he was a physical therapy major, and didn’t have the time. I was kinda looking for some way to help the community, and said okay. I got a few of my other fraternity brothers to help me out, and the next month we were assistant coaches at a practice for the Mission Hill Reds.
A Little League Head Coach
By 1999, the head coach had moved up to coach at a higher level, and I found myself a 20-year-old head coach of a Little League team in a poor neighborhood of Boston. And I loved every minute of it. As a parent now, I can only imagine what the parents thought when they found their kids had been placed on a team coached by a 20-year-old. One of the parents was the uncle of Red Sox prospect Manny Delcarmen, and he agreed to help me out. He was actually the first volunteer I ever recruited.
These were great kids, and we had a lot of fun. We won a lot of games for two simple reasons. We played our infield in the whole game, and we ran hard on everything. I figured that the kids couldn’t throw that well any way, so why put them in position to have to make long throws. With the infield in, they were in a position to succeed.
On the other side, I figured that if other teams could make the throws to get us out, that they should do so. Plus, it made the game really fun for the kids. They learned how to play the right way. Took a while to get the parents in the stands behind me to cease screaming at their kids to stop at third when I was waving them home, but eventually we all got on the same page.
In 2000, we actually went undefeated. I’m not bragging about this, I just had really good kids who played really hard. In my basement, I’ve still got the score-book from that season.
Getting Help
In 2001, they asked me to serve on the board of the league. They only had five people on the board, so I think they were asking anyone who they thought might say yes. Turns out we had the same problem that they’d had when Mitch had stopped to recruit me. So I thought about it, and started asking people I knew to help. I had a little bit of luck asking my fraternity brothers, but the key was asking the guys in the other fraternities on the hill. Once we got other fraternities involved, the league had a steady supply of coaches, and a great relationship was born.
There has always been some tension on Mission Hill between college students looking for a place to stay while attending school, and the local population. I like to think that our coaching has helped to ease that.
An Unlikely Legacy
After graduating school, I lost track of the league for a while. I took a job out of the city, moved off Mission Hill, and stopped coaching. My fraternity eventually disbanded. I moved first to Connecticut, then to Maine, and then back to Connecticut. Got married. Had a family.
You can imagine my surprise when a couple of years ago I Googled some of my old friends in the league to find that the league, which had been struggling was now thriving, and doing so in large part because of the number of college kids who were volunteering to coach the teams. When I looked at the current coaching roster for the league, there are a lot of kids with husky.neu.edu email addresses.
I certainly didn’t think that any of my players would almost make the majors. One of them did, getting to AAA with the Mets. I remember him as a kid with great hands at 9-years-old. I do wonder how the rest of them are doing.
And all of it happened because Mitch stopped his car and said hello. I don’t recommend the “stop the car and ask people on the street to volunteer for you”, but I do recommend always keeping your eyes peeled for potential volunteers, and not ruling people out because they’re too young. For all the high-tech ways we think of bringing people in, never overlook the power of saying, “hello.”
You could be getting a future leader, and maybe, lots of them.
Happy Memorial Day Weekend. I hope it’s a good one for your and family.
If you’ve enjoyed this aricle, you can find more like it in the Grow Your Group Blog. Please consider supporting us by checking out our great affiliates.
Photo by Ron Cogswell 