But the bitter events of that tournament prompted Layton Aliviado to consider moving the team out of the PONY League and into Little League.
Before the state tournament in Hilo, teams in the district tournament complained that Kini Enos did not belong on the team, that he lived with his parents outside the league’s geographic boundaries. The director of the state organization investigated and found that the address listed on official forms was inaccurate. That was the address of his uncle, not his parents.
After an investigation, the state administrator declared Enos ineligible to play in all-star games and suspended Aliviado as manager of the team.
All of Hawaii’s families attended the World Series almost 6,000 miles from home.
Gwen Earll, the state director of the PONY League, delivered the news to Aliviado.
“We found that he was playing out of the boundaries, living in another area,” she told me. “He kept insisting that he does live there and whatever. But if you [can qualify for a league] because your uncle lives there, anybody can do it. His parents were saying that he lived with an uncle. But you have to go by where the parents live, otherwise everybody does it.”
The PONY League’s office gets a smattering of complaints every year about teams using ineligible players. The complaints don’t usually start until the tournaments, when opponents have a greater stake in the competition. Teams that win the state tournament win the right to travel to the mainland for the West regional tournament. In her decade running the state PONY organization, Earll says, she has disqualified only three or four players.
Aliviado was angry. He claimed that the league betrayed him and Kini Enos by allowing them to participate in the league and the first round of tournament play, and then turning them away.
“With all the paperwork they had, they qualified the kid,” Aliviado says, his voice rising to a singsong. “And all of the sudden, the [state organization] said he was illegal, he wasn’t in the district. But I told her, ‘You know what, you qualified him and now you’re going to take that away from him. Why did you qualify him in the first place?’”
Aliviado says the incident brought home how resentful other teams would be because of the team’s success. “You know what, there’s a lot of jealousy for the kids who make the all-stars,” he says. “That’s why I was pissed off. You’re taking the kid out of the game—if the paperwork wasn’t good enough, you shouldn’t qualify him. When Kini was crying, I was sad. ‘Why you do this to this kid?’ She couldn’t say nothing. It’s all jealousy.”
Aliviado doesn’t dispute that he was using an illegal player. His complaint is that all of his players were cleared before tournament play began and only challenged when another team filed a protest.
The Waipio all-stars—minus a manager and a star player—won the state tournament and advanced to the West regional tournament in Chino Hills, California. In Chino Hills, the team lost two one-run games and was eliminated.
In both the state and regional tournaments, Aliviado managed the team from the stands—an easy feat in Hilo, but harder to maneuver in California. As he sat in the stands, frustrated because he had to let go of his play-by-play control of the team, Aliviado started to think about the future.
The tournament in Chino Hills taught important lessons about winning and losing. Even though the team played well, the players and their parents were distracted. The team took a trip to Disneyland before play began. At the hotel, the players exhausted themselves swimming in the pool. Meanwhile, the parents drank into the night and bickered among themselves. Factions developed, often over which kid got to play what position. Aliviado did not want to repeat the experience.
Next time, Aliviado told other parents as they stewed over the events of 2003, we’re going to play to win. It’s not enough to beat Mililani. The point of playing in these summer tournaments is to win and advance to the next level. The families have to commit to doing everything they can to go all the way—even winning a national or international championship. No sports team in Hawaii had ever won an international championship before.
“We had to all be focused on one thing,” Aliviado says. “They had to trust me to do the right thing and forget about anything else.”
Not only because of his vision and toughness as a coach, but also because of his blue-collar background, Layton Aliviado is the emblem of the West Oahu all-stars.
The son of a cop, Aliviado lived on both the islands of Oahu and Maui as a kid. His favorite sport was basketball, which he played for a year in high school. Baseball was not fast enough for him. He also boxed and surfed. He met his future wife when he was a sophomore in high school and she was a freshman. Layton and Debbie met at Skate World, a roller skating arena on the other side of the island, where she lived. “I used to try to hang out and act cool,” he says. “I saw her skating and wondered who she was and asked my cousin for her phone number.” When he was eighteen and she was seventeen, they had their first child, Layton Junior. “Her dad wanted to kill me,” he laughs. “But if he did, his grandson wouldn’t have no father. And everybody saw that we stayed together, so that’s good.”
After graduating from Waipahu High School in 1981, Aliviado enrolled in the National Guard and started loading trucks for Magnum Transportation. At twenty-one, he qualified for his trucker’s license, and he’s been driving ever since. Four years after the arrival of Layton Junior (who now works for a cement company), Debbie gave birth to Lacie (who now works as a real estate appraiser). Eight years after that, Layson Aliviado—Kaeo is his Hawaiian middle name—was born.
Aliviado first started coaching baseball when his first son started playing. He coached him all the way through high school. A couple of years after that, he started coaching Kaeo in T-ball. The cycle started over again. The whole time, he has played for a men’s softball team. “He just loves his baseball, you know?” says Debbie, a personal financial advisor.
Jerome Williams, now a starting pitcher for the Chicago Cubs, is Aliviado’s most famous player. As Williams watched the games on ESPN, he recognized the same coaching style he experienced in PONY baseball under Aliviado. He saw how strong and thick the Hawaii players were, and he knew why. Aliviado made his players run sprints and long distances, up and down hills. The more they complained, the more he made them run. Running made them stronger than they ever thought they could be.
“When we’re young, we didn’t want to work, we just wanted to play and have fun,” Williams tells me. “If you’re strong in the legs, everything will come after that. At that time I didn’t realize how important it was. I was throwing the ball hard. Why did I need to run? We started pouting, ‘Aw, coach, come on.’ But we can’t say nothing because we’re only eleven years old. Some parents didn’t like it. They’d say, ‘No, my child is coming home, his body is sore.’ But we discovered that when you do something a lot, you get used to it. The parents changed their mind in the middle of the season when they could see us get stronger and better. Then they’re all, ‘Oh yes, you have to listen to the coach.’”
I asked Williams if he gives Aliviado any credit for his success as a major leaguer.
He paused for a moment. Learning to work hard was a great lesson, he said, but lots of coaches could have taught him that. Something else made the difference.
As the only black player on the team, Williams endured racist taunts from other teams in the league. His father, Glenn Williams, told him to ignore the ugliness and just work hard. But he needed to hear it from someone else. When Aliviado talked to him about race, he listened.
“Other coaches at that time didn’t like me because I was black,” Williams says. “Kids at that age are calling me names and I couldn’t take it. Layton knew I could play and gave me a chance. He said, just do like your dad did, never mind what these guys tell you. Let your talent take over everything else. I actually listened to that. I took that from when I was ten until now. The first time I heard that it was from my dad and I didn’t believe it. But when you hear
it from another adult, someone you look up to, you listen.”
Actually, what Aliviado taught Williams he learned from Williams’s father. When Aliviado played basketball as a kid, his coach was Glenn Williams.
May the circle be unbroken.
For years after the sugar plantation closed in the 1980s, Ewa was a fringe area. It was hard to reach because of poor roads. The houses were cheap and unattractive. Even the beaches were run down, lacking all but a few modest amenities.
Leon Edel, the literary critic who lived his last quarter-century in Hawaii, dismissed the old sugar town: “There is no particular reason to go to Ewa, no shops, no businesses, no famous views, no place to eat or even walk far; there is only the fact that the place is there, intact, a plantation town from another period.”
That was then, this is now. Ewa’s population has increased from 5,000 to 50,000 in a generation. Off Fort Weaver Road, the north-south artery that leads to the H-1 Freeway, housing developments and shopping and office parks are blooming everywhere. Every year the developers increase their prices—from under $300,000 for a three-bedroom home five years ago to $500,000 for the same house today—and each year the houses sell out before they’re built.
In the last decade, developers have built thousands of units of new housing. With every expansion of housing—660 units here, 400 units there—the prices leap. Getting into a modest three-bedroom townhouse now costs more than a half-million dollars.
The U.S. Census Bureau calls the area Ewa Villages, a euphemism for spurt of uncoordinated growth. The housing developments carry names grander than their construction—Ewa By Gentry and Ocean Pointe.
Tesha Malama, a member of a community advisory commission and candidate for state Senate, pushed for a resolution calling for a moratorium on development until traffic and infrastructure issues could be addressed.
“I have seen Ewa Beach grow from a two-lane, dark, winding road lined with sugar cane to a parking lot four-lane road lined with houses,” Malama tells me. “Our schools are bulging at the seams, our roads are like parking lots, and our cultural resources are like limu seaweed, which was once abundant on our beaches until people from all over the island came and picked it until it was almost extinct.”
The sprawling growth played a critical role in the making of the Little League World Series team of 2005. In 2002, the population in the Ewa Beach Little League’s territory grew so fast that it had to split into two to conform to Little League boundary rules. The spinoff was called the West Oahu Little League.
Like all new organizations, the West Oahu Little League was open to being shaped and molded by anyone who wanted to take over and make it their own.
Which is exactly what Layton Aliviado did when he moved his PONY League all-star team before the 2004 season.
When the Waipio PONY League all-stars got home at the end of the summer of 2003, Aliviado and the other parents decided to pull their kids out of the PONY League and put them into Little League.
Jumping leagues came at the perfect time. The new West Oahu Little League was such a small, fledgling organization that it could only field two teams. Aliviado managed the Red Sox, the team that won the championship in the next two years. Tyron Kitashima managed the Cubs. The two teams practiced together both summers, with the sole goal of developing a team capable of winning the Little League World Series in 2005.
Because the league boundaries for PONY and Little League were different, the move allowed Aliviado to bring new players into his all-star team. Aliviado started with his core of players—Kaeo Aliviado, Kini Enos, and Sheyne Baniaga, the three cousins who started playing together on a T-ball club. Vonn Fe’ao joined the group when they were eight years old. The others came along over the next couple of years.
With the move to Little League, the boys could continue to play on a field with sixty-foot bases. In the PONY League, eleven- and twelve-year- old boys move up to play on seventy-foot bases. “Our kids were getting bigger and stronger and would be more dominant with the smaller field sizes,” says Clint Tirpak, one of the team’s coaches. “If you’re playing the odds, that’s what to go for.”
Another advantage of Little League was that they could play against lesser teams from Hawaii. The powerhouse for youth baseball in Hawaii was the PONY team from Mililani. Aliviado’s team beat Mililani in the state championship in 2003, but it was easier to advance to the mainland without Mililani in the way.
A final advantage was TV. Players and coaches freely acknowledged that the chance to play games broadcast on ESPN and ABC—starting with the regional tournament in San Bernardino, California—made Little League more attractive than the PONY League.
When the 2004 season arrived, the teams set a simple goal: Win the district championship and advance to the state tournament.
No one cared much about what happened during the season. The primary focus was training the kids for the all-star tournaments. They set their sights on the mainland. They wanted to qualify for the Northwest regional tournament in San Bernardino, where they could win a berth in the Little League World Series in Williamsport.
“We knew we had a good team, but we never [thought] about other teams,” says Aliviado. “We didn’t care if we won or lost because our goal is to go to the all-stars and see how far we can go. We beat everyone, and every game we hit one or two home runs. But we never cared. The goal was to work the kids hard, and if we lose one or two it doesn’t matter. I wasn’t worried about that. Still, we went undefeated.”
Long before the season started, Aliviado and Kitashima agreed to hold intensive workouts all summer long to prepare for the all-star team’s effort to play in the Little League World Series. All twenty-four players from the two teams would train together. Only half of them would make the all-star team; everyone would share the commitment to get the all-stars ready for tournament competition.
And the all-star team was more successful than anyone imagined. West Oahu Little League won the 2004 district tournament and advanced to the state tournament in Hilo. The team lost both games they played by one run, 1–0 and 4–3. Not bad for a bunch of eleven-year-olds in a tournament dominated by twelve-year-olds.
Wherever they played—the PONY League, Cal Ripken League, Little League, or tournaments for travel teams—baseball was always the top sport for Layton Aliviado’s players.
But other sports—especially football—gave the team the toughness it needed to survive a long and grinding summer of tournaments.
A bunch of the players—Vonn Fe’ao and Alaka’i Aglipay, Sheyne Baniaga and Kaeo Aliviado—played football in the fall.
Aglipay’s mother kept him out of football until he was eleven. She was worried he’d get hurt and wouldn’t be able to play baseball. But she finally said okay and Aglipay became an instant football star. He got bigger and stronger and tougher, qualities that served him well in baseball.
Football gave the Little Leaguers a strategy for training and conditioning. Football also made them tough in combat. In tackle football, every play has the potential to break a bone or pull a muscle—or just rough up a kid so he can’t move much the next day. No matter how big or small they were, the kids who played football learned how to be more aggressive than most baseball players.
“On almost every play, something hurts when you’re playing tackle football,” says Darryl Stevenson, a retired army guy who coaches youth football. “There’s no way you can’t get hurt. Every play, you get hit. Football is a straight contact sport. You’re hurling the body. You have eleven other guys trying to hit you.”
Knowing that “you have a target on your back all the time” teaches these kids to be aggressive all the time. You can’t avoid injuries by holding back. So you charge forward as hard as you can, and you get strong enough to survive some hits and nimble enough to avoid other hits.
In football, you build their bodies in different ways than most baseball players. You build for toughness and endurance. You build lower body strength. You build explosive
power. You develop lateral movement. And you do it all with a set of boot-camp drills that would make most young baseball players wilt.
As the Ewa families plotted their course to the Little League World Series, they also gave themselves a backup plan.
Since 2001, Cal Ripken Baseball has staged a World Series of its own in Aberdeen, Maryland. That’s the town an hour north of Baltimore where Cal Ripken, baseball’s all-time iron man, grew up. The Ripken organization has combined forces with Babe Ruth Baseball in an effort to transform baseball in America from the ground up.
Ripken Baseball offered two major advantages for Aliviado’s bunch. First, the league plays three seasons. Each season’s top two teams can play in state and regional tournaments and have a shot at the World Series. Second, many of the Ripken all-star teams were better than the Little League all-stars. They draw from broader geographic areas, so they can pick and choose the best pitchers and other star players. So the Ripken teams would make strong opponents.
The Ewa all-stars played in the winter league of Ripken Baseball and qualified to play in the all-star tournaments the following summer. That provided an alternative to the Little League marathon, if they wanted to use it.
When the West Oahu Little League all-stars met for the first time in 2005, Layton Aliviado invited the parents of the players to the scraggly old field near the old Ewa Sugar Plantation. While the kids played on the fields below, Aliviado lectured the parents and set the rules for the team.
Little League, Big Dreams Page 9