Paris Inman had a relatively simple assignment several years ago: find a place for his 5-year-old son to play T-ball.
He trolled the grounds of Kelly Miller Middle and Gage Eckington Elementary schools, only to find trash stuffed into the backstops. Inman phoned his D.C. councilman, alerted his LeDroit Park neighbors,and even resorted to taking pictures of the litter in his attempt to find a playable field.
“I had to do all of this to start a T-ball program for my son,” he said.
Inman, now the district administrator for D.C. Little League, is one of many Washington-area baseball lovers who are working feverishly to revive youth baseball in the area. In the past 12 years, the number of Little League participants in the United States has dropped by more than 300,000, or 12 percent, with much of the decline occurring among African-Americans.
“Outside of Wards 2, 3 and 4, [youth baseball has] been staggering in the past 10 to 15 years” in D.C., said Brendan Sullivan Jr., a former Triple A-level player drafted by the San Diego Padres in 1996. He now is director of Headfirst Baseball, the largest provider of professional sports instruction in the Washington area.
Sullivan oversees year-round camps, sports clinics and after-school programs designed to get area children interested in the game. His coaches all have played professional baseball at some level. Even so, he said, attracting youngsters is not that simple in some areas.
“I could get into my San Diego Padres uniform, march down to Ward 7, announce through a megaphone that I’m holding a free clinic, and I’m not sure a single kid would show up,” he said.
Ed Wojtkowski, district administrator of Greater Bethesda/Calvert/Waldorf Little League, said the number of options for youngsters these days has contributed to baseball’s decline.
“You have soccer. You have lacrosse. You have the Internet. You have Nintendo,” he said. “Kids have a lot of choices these days.”
Saul Grosser, safety officer for Alexandria Little League, said the league had about 300 participants this past year, an increase over 10 years ago, but added that keeping players interested has been much more difficult.
“There’s a big drop-off after age 13,” he said. “Parents aren’t as enthusiastic, and kids have other hobbies. There’s another drop-off after age 15, when the … other option to play is in high school.”
Bob Sottile, the District 10 administrator for Little League in Fairfax, said that as kids have started playing organized baseball earlier — some even at age 4 — they often tire of the sport and switch to different activities during their teenage years.
“We’re putting these kids under pressure [when they’re] too young,” he said. “People talk about not keeping score. You may not keep scores in a game, but they know. The parents brag about it.”
Sullivan grew up with baseball. His father, Brendan, a Washington lawyer, took him to Baltimore Orioles games and played catch with him and his brother on the front lawn every day.
Similarly, Inman taught his two young sons how to play by going out and playing catch with them, but he said the tradition of fathers teaching their sons to play is dying today, particularly in urban areas.
The answer, Sullivan said, is to recruit quality coaches to get kids hooked on the game early.
“It’s a sport you better start at 6 or 7 — you can’t do it at 11 or 12,” he said. “Baseball’s a very hard game to play once in a while and be successful at.”
The nature of the sport can lead to an undue sense of fear among youngsters, he added.
“Baseball takes a lot of individual work, and there’s a lot of individual failure involved,” he said, alluding to strikeouts, misjudged fly balls and fielding errors that can embarrass young players. “That just doesn’t happen in sports like soccer, basketball or football.”
“Little League itself is a nice organization, but it’s not the secret sauce,” Sullivan said. “The little leagues aren’t good enough to train or teach the love of the game. There are plenty of great parents. You don’t need to have my [playing] experience to be a great Little League coach.”
Sottile, though, said the parent-as-coach dynamic is often difficult logistically.
“We have so few adults putting in the time anymore,” he said. “With both parents working a lot of the time, there’s almost no way to manage or coach a team that plays games at 6.”
To remedy that problem, Inman has focused almost entirely on developing a core group of volunteers to generate interest in the game.
For his part, Wojtkowski established coaching clinics throughout Maryland four years ago, bringing in instructors from all over.
“Teach coaches how to teach the game,” he said.
League administrators said reversing the drop in interest among African-Americans is key to revitalizing youth baseball. “If we don’t stem that tide, certainly, the trend will continue,” Sullivan said.
“That was one of my goals,” said Brant Hester, who founded Bethesda Little League last year. “I wasn’t interested in being a white sheet of paper. I wanted to be rainbow-ish.”
They also said the lack of role models discourages the participation of African-Americans.
“You have very few blacks in Major League Baseball, other than Dominicans,” Alexandria’s Grosser said. “There are very few coming out of college.”
“The inner-city kids don’t idolize baseball players,” he added. “Inner-city participation is typically pretty poor for baseball.”
Dave Schauer, the vice president of Capitol City Little League, said he grew up in the 1960s and ’70s watching the Pittsburgh Pirates, and recalled that about a quarter of major leaguers then were black. In 1975, 27 percent of major league players were African-American. Now, it’s about 8 percent.
For Schauer, it all comes back to good coaching.
“At the end of the day, if it’s not a level playing field, it’s discouraging,” he said. “Attracting [African-Americans] is not the difficult part — keeping them is. I think if we get the Brendan Sullivans teaching coaches how to coach, we’ll see some real progress.”
