If your son has ever attended baseball camp with me, then he's heard the "Dominican Republic" story about my many trips there bringing baseball equipment, building fields, training local coaches, and making classroom visits in the local schools.
The point of the story is threefold:
1) To educate the campers about a country with the 2nd most number of players in professional baseball (after the United States).
2) To give them a sense of perspective about how lucky they are in their baseball lives to play on incredible fields, with brand new equipment, uniforms, umpires, and dedicated coaches while the kids in the Dominican are playing with sticks and rocks in the street in their bare feet because they don't own shoes.
3) To give them the opportunity to go home and gather up some old baseball equipment of their own to donate to the kids in the Dominican. Service to others is an important component of character building and going through the garage for last year's cleats is something even 6 year olds can do.
While I haven't personally been able to make it down to the DR for many years (I went every Thanksgiving for 5 years in a row after graduating from college), I have continued to collect gear at camp whenever I've had a worthy baseball cause to donate it to - whether locally or abroad. I will write another blog about my personal experiences down there but I can tell you that you've never witnessed a joy like the joy on a 9 year old Dominican boy's face when he puts on a baseball glove for the first time in his life.
In 2018 I'm thrilled to have another direct pipeline to the Dominican Republic through, and this is the best part, a Spring Training camp family!
Through a work connection that lead to the Dodgers front office and ultimately a series of meetings with Manny Mota, a small group of former campers made the trip down to the DR last winter and delivered baseball bats, gloves, cleats, hats, balls, and tees to distribute to the local community near Manny's academy.
The boys on this trip have now started an official club at Peninsula High School to support the collection efforts and they will be returning again later this year.
What we're going to do at camp this summer is really put a big effort into collecting as much equipment as possible to send down with them - I think this should be the biggest collection opportunity in the history of youth baseball as literally everyone's bats from last season are now illegal!
I've made the donation process as easy as possible and if you would like to contribute, you can drop any baseball gear at baseball camp through the summer.
Here are the drop-off details:
Where: Rolling Hills Little League (3011 PV Drive North, RHE, CA 90274)
When: Mondays through Fridays. June 11 through August 17. 9am - 3pm.
Those are normal camp hours for the summer and you can simply drop your donation by the Major Field Press Box. On a daily basis we will transport the gear from the field to the camp family's home before being loaded into a shipping container and being sent by boat to the DR.
This is a really exciting initiative that I hope provides a ton of baseball joy to the kids in the DR who have so little in their lives while also providing our kids with a valuable lesson about gratitude and service.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
(Yes, that's me throwing flyballs at a "practice" circa 2004)
