Little League, Big Dreams

by Charles Euchner

Vonn Fe’ao signs autographs and meets well-wishers after earning the victory in Hawaii’s championship game.

  Resorts invited the players to stay with them. One father took four of the kids on a deep-sea diving expedition at the Ko Olina Beach Club and Hotel, gratis. Companies showered them with gifts—clothes, sports equipment, and fast food for a year.

  Wherever the players went, strangers recognized them. Kini Enos and his family sat in a McDonald’s one morning, having breakfast on his yearlong free pass, when a man looked up with a stunned look. “He pointed at Kini, like, ‘Are you one of the guys?’” his mother Girlie recalls. “Kini just nodded. The man put down his fork and walked over and said, ‘Can I shake your hand?’”

  A championship can transform the desirability of even the quietest kids in a school. By all external appearances, Vonn Fe’ao looks like a cool kid. His black and brown ringlets of hair flow down his shoulders, and his granite build and tough-guy glare can be intimidating on both football and baseball fields. But he’s still shy, and some of the tough kids used to haze him in the school halls and playground. But not so much after the Little League World Series.

  Hawaii’s Kaeo Aliviado looks into the stands for family and friends after a Series game.

  “A lot of people notice me, and I never had that before,” Fe’ao told me before the game at Pearl City. “Kids are treating me different. The people that used to treat me bad, now they hang around and they’re my friends now. They’re boys who used to cause trouble. They would start a fight with me. They would say something about what I looked like, who I hung with, stuff like that.”

  There’s another side to the fame. “They have a target on their backs now,” says Darryl Stevenson, Fe’ao’s fall football coach. “Other teams have a tendency to take some extra shots. Especially in Vonn’s case, because everyone knows who he is now. The kids know who you are, and they want to prove that they’re good, too. Vonn’s challenge is keeping his composure when he knows everyone’s going after him.”

  When he got home, Fe’ao announced that he would not get his hair cut, even to play football. He knows his flowing curly locks are part of his image. He stuffs his hair under a tight synthetic cap when he plays football. But the hair has its costs to a young boy’s ego. A newspaper in Sese Fe’ao’s homeland of Tonga reports that Vonn Fe’ao is the first girl to play in the Little League World Series. Sese and Heather and the other parents were amused. Vonn was not.

  The University of Hawaii football team invited the Little Leaguers to watch a game against USC at Aloha Stadium. The boys were announced during halftime and took off their hats and bowed to all four sides of the field. The crowd roared. At one point, fans held up a sign reading “PUT FE’AO IN.”

  Layton Aliviado, the architect and construction manager of the championship team, graduated to high school baseball when he got back to the islands. The Saint Louis School, the elite academy that produced a major leaguer named Benny Agbayani, hired him to coach the junior varsity team.

  Aliviado’s new team struggled in its early going, losing four of its first five practice games. Like all of Aliviado’s teams, the Saint Louis players quickly learned that Aliviado demands discipline and brutal conditioning. Early in the season, the team arrived at the field without the bucket of balls. As punishment, they did suicide drills.

  “Everybody’s got to remember to bring all the equipment,” he says. “But we got there and we didn’t have the balls. So I thought about it for a day and made them run suicide drills. You start at the end zone on a football field and go to the five-yard line, touch the line, run back, run to the ten-yard line and back, the fifteen-yard line and back, all the way to the fifty-yard line, for twenty minutes. They won’t forget next time. And now they’re stronger, too.”

  Aliviado experiences a surge of nostalgia when he hears “Centerfield,” the John Fogerty song that blared on the PA system in the Little League World Series. “I get kind of choked up,” he says. “It’s full of memories for me, looking at the stands, and thinking, ‘Man, we’re at the World Series.’ Hardly anyone makes it. You don’t even dream it until you’re almost there.”

  Aliviado wants to return to Williamsport some day to look at his team’s picture on the wall in the cafeteria. “When you look at the Hall of Fame wall and see the champions over the years—well, I used to look at the pictures and wonder if Hawaii could make it. That always stays in my mind. One day, hopefully, I can go back and look at our picture.”

  The biggest opportunity for the new celebrities—and the biggest problem, too—was school.

  Some of the boys missed three weeks of school. Classes started in early August, just three days before the team left for the regional tournament in San Bernardino, California. Quentin Guevara, for one, struggled to catch up. In the first quarter of classes at Waipahu Intermediate School, he got two Fs in English and he didn’t do much better in other subjects. He had to go to school as early as 6:30 in the morning for special help. He sometimes spent his lunch hour getting tutoring. He was getting frustrated and sometimes begged his mother to let him give up.

  Most parents hoped that their kids could catch up and take advantage of the private-school scholarships that have become part of the new atmosphere around the football fields and baseball diamonds on the western part of Oahu these days. Coaches at elite schools watched the kids perform on TV and they like their physical and mental makeup. But they have to get good enough grades to satisfy the admissions office.

  Some players came home more focused and determined. Denise Baniaga says her son Sheyne used to require constant nagging to do homework and help around the house. But no more.

  “He’s more confident and just striving more,” she told me as we watched him play football. “Last year, he didn’t push himself at all—he gets a B, whatever; he gets a C, whatever. But this year he’s really pushing himself. He knows that he has a chance to get into some good schools. All the moms are trying to get their kids in a place where they can go to college. I never went to college. From our family, none of us did. The men would work right out of high school. For me, I had my first child right out of high school, and I didn’t work till later.”

  She’s now a part-time clerk in the front office at Mauka Lani Elementary School. The aspirations of the teachers and staff—and other parents and families—have made a strong impression. “Our school is a distinguished school, we win all kinds of awards,” she says. “It makes me want to make sure my kids are doing good.”

  “I don’t want him to be a truck driver like me,” John Baniaga said. But the parents don’t just appreciate the opportunities that school offers. They also appreciate the way private schools work, free of the bureaucracy of the public schools. “Private schools let you know if your kids are having problems,” Layton Aliviado said. “The kids don’t get lost. Public school is what you want to make of it, and not everyone’s ready for that. Private schools is one team, one dream.”

  Kaeo Aliviado and Harrison Kam celebrate Hawaii’s victory in the Little League World Series.

  Vonn Fe’ao and Alaka’i Aglipay got the most attention from schools.

  Fe’ao had a tentative scholarship offer from the Saint Louis School, a Catholic school started in 1846 by missionaries. A Polynesian alum volunteered to pay the tuition if he could get admitted. Vonn was also interested in Punahou High School, golf sensation Michelle Wie’s school. Earlier in the year, Sports Illustrated ranked Punahou fourth in the nation for high school sports. The school offers 115 teams in thirty sports and has won more state championships (318) than any other school in America. USA Today ranked Punahou’s baseball team tenth in the nation.

  Aglipay also wanted to play for Punahou. A couple of years ago, when his parents took him out of school and signed him up to work with a tutor, no one had much hope that he’d score well enough on the entrance tests to get in. But in January of 2006, he shocked everyone by easily meeting Punahou’s minimum scores.

  When he got his Secondary Sc
hool Aptitude Test scores, he was so happy that his friends and family could barely recognize him. He never reacted that way to his success as an athlete, which came so naturally.

  “You should have seen that smile on his face,” Linda Sofa, his tutor, said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Hawaii’s Vonn Fe’ao

  As travel teams transform the landscape of youth baseball, Little League could reposition itself as the organization dedicated to play for play’s sake.

  POSTGAME

  Finding the Soul of Little League

  WHEN I STARTED TO EXPLORE THE WORLD of Little League, one of the first people I visited was Tom Galla, who coached the Little League World Series champions of 1989.

  That team from Trumbull, Connecticut, became a national story because it defied all the odds in beating the team from Taiwan. Teams from Asia had won the World Series in sixteen of the previous twenty years. The Asian teams were so dominant, in fact, that one year Little League actually banned foreign teams from the tournament in Williamsport.

  All these years later, Galla remembers his experience with fondness and pride. He took a bunch of suburban kids and trained them to beat one of the biggest powerhouses in all of sports. It was Little League’s version of the Miracle on Ice. When we talked, Galla still seemed like he couldn’t quite believe that his boys had won the title.

  Galla told me how he built the team. He made it clear to the parents that his decisions as coach were final and their job was to support him. He told them to cancel their summer vacations. That summer was going to be all about baseball. Winning the Little League World Series was an extreme long shot. To even have a chance, the team had to focus completely on the goal. It was like a youth sports version of the Manhattan Project. Without total commitment, the enterprise was guaranteed to fail.

  “I told them basically that [the coaches] were running the team,” Galla told me. “We were working with the kids every day. We said, look, we’re going to know your kids better than you, and we’re going to know who should be on the field and who’s going to play other roles. And it may be for reasons that are hard to explain. We were with those kids every day. In the beginning we had double workouts, in the morning and the afternoon. We took them to the movies, we’d have watermelon after practice, we’d have swimming pool parties. They were our kids from July 1 until August 26.”

  On one matter—the actual selection of the team—Galla gave up almost all of the control that coaches usually exercise.

  Typically, the coaches from the Little League organization gather around June 15 to select that year’s all-star team. Sometimes the leagues give the team’s manager the final say. Sometimes the league’s coaches vote. Sometimes they require consensus on every player. But it’s the adults who get together and make the decisions.

  But the Trumbull Little League let the players in the league decide who would represent them on the all-star team. The league’s president went from team to team and distributed ballots. The players picked the first ten players for the twelve-man team. Galla and his assistant selected four other players; two of them would get reserve roles on the team, and two would work out with the team but not play unless someone got hurt or left the team.

  “I would have picked the same ten, in the same exact order,” Galla says. “The kids got a ballot and they could choose anybody they wanted in the league. And they got it right.”

  That inspired an idea for reforming youth sports. But more on that in a moment.

  At a dinner party a few months after the 2005 Little League World Series, I met a Little League coach from Connecticut who watched the games on TV. Tad McGwire, a coach in the Branford Little League, commented on the infamous Florida-California game. He was amazed— and disappointed—to see Dante Bichette’s pacing and snarling in Florida’s dugout. Bichette, the former major league slugger, was unhappy with how the game was going. And his response was to bring the big-league game of intimidation to Williamsport’s field of dreams.

  As we discussed Bichette’s meltdown, we talked about why things get so intense in a tournament like the Little League World Series.

  It always comes down to the adults.

  The adults are the ones who create an obsessive desire to win.

  The adults are the ones to push players when they’re hurting.

  The adults are the ones making nasty comments from the stands.

  The adults are the ones to argue with umpires and play mind games with the other team.

  The adults are the ones who have a hard time dealing with losing.

  The adults run every aspect of the games in Little League.

  Give them credit for how much they care. Coaches devote hundreds of hours to teaching kids how to play baseball—and the best ones also teach them how to get along, mind their manners, and be good teammates. That’s an amazing sacrifice. Imagine what would happen if that much help went into tutoring the kids or leading the kids on summerlong projects for Habitat for Humanity or rebuilding the Gulf Coast.

  But in the process of giving their lives over to Little League teams, these adults can lose perspective. Because they understand the structure of the competition better—the long train of tournaments, the pool system, and what kind of players you need to win—they care more. As the team advances through the qualifying tournaments, the need to win becomes more and more intense. Winning becomes part of their identity. Coaches feel a swelling need to produce, to show other adults that they’re going to make their kids win.

  The kids don’t even know where Williamsport is, but the adults get fixated on getting there.

  The central part of the problem might be that—because they’re older and more experienced—the adults assume that only they can run a team. They know how to run practices. They know how to make a lineup card. They know when to bunt and when to swing away, when to use a pinch hitter, and when to make a defensive change. They know who should pitch, and how long, and who should come in to relieve.

  Over the course of a long dinner conversation, someone suggested a radical solution.

  If Tom Galla could give the selection of his all-star team to the players in the league, why not take things a step further?

  Give the game back to the kids.

  And you know what? It makes sense.

  All relationships involve boundaries. Friends should not press each other to do things they don’t want to do. Spouses need to be available for each other, but also have lives of their own. Workmates should not get too intimate with each other on the job. And adults—parents and coaches—should respect their children’s growing need for autonomy.

  Once upon a time, adults and children in America lived in the same world for part of the day but then left each other alone in their recreational pursuits. Parents set the rules and taught their children, but also gave them plenty of room to be kids. Parents knew that children need to live in their own worlds—exploring the woods, building forts, playing games, making money on paper routes and babysitting, and running in gangs (the non-lethal variety).

  But in the last half-century, as Americans moved to suburban pods and life got more fragmented, specialized, and separated, parents started getting more involved in their kids’ lives. Parents pressured kids to play sports, take up an instrument, and go to computer camp. Parents started to manage their kids. Rather than setting expectations and consequences, parents got deeply involved in the details of their kids’ lives.

  However youth baseball evolves, kids will always line up for a chance to play the international pastime.

  This is a gross generalization, of course. We live not only in the age of the overmanaged kid, but also in the age of the neglected kid. But sometimes, they go together. When parents aren’t around after school because of jobs and other obligations, they tend to get more intensely involved in designing what the kids do. It’s the old myth of “quality time.”

  Little League has been part of this process of engineering childhood. Little League was, in fac
t, one of the first programs in America explicitly designed to involve parents in managing their kids.

  Don’t get me wrong. There are all kinds of things to like about Little League and the long summer of baseball leading to the World Series.

  Playing baseball on a real team—regardless of whether the team traveled away from home, or whether the players won international acclaim with their televised heroics—can have a huge impact on children’s lives.

  If you have a great coach like Hawaii’s Layton Aliviado, you learn how to sacrifice and work hard. You learn how to accept a role, support teammates, control your temper, and think ahead. You learn to look beyond your own prejudices and limitations and become part of something bigger. All of these great qualities become a part of you.

  Understanding baseball—or anything—can help to understand other things better. The positive habits from one activity can carry over to other parts of life. When you learn to sacrifice, work hard, cooperate, and respect others on the ball field, you can transfer those habits to other realms like school and family life.

  Except that it doesn’t always work out that way. We all know countless people who excel in one area and are completely sloppy and inadequate in others. It helps to know how to do things right in one area, but it’s no guarantee.

  The debate over Little League—over its millions of games and the tournaments that lead to the World Series, as well as other programs and tournaments across the world—can be simplistic. It’s either the most wholesome place for kids to learn and grow together—or it’s an adultdominated place of excessive competitiveness. In fact, Little League— and all youth sports—can be as good and as bad as supporters and detractors say.

  In the final analysis, it’s not the league or tournament that matters; it’s how people get immersed in the game.