Little League - A little reality check

By Mickey Niland

There has been a great deal of griping, on all sides, about the field use at Loyal Heights Playfield. I think it's important for everyone to understand what youth sports are about. It's not about the would-be professional athletes. It's about the other 99 percent of the kids. The following is a story that illustrates why so many of us give up such a big part of our lives to put kids on a field like Loyal Heights.

Billy's tale

This last weekend I signed up to umpire three ball games on Saturday. Over the course of the day several people asked me A) if I was crazy and B) why do I do it?

The answers are as follows: A) Most likely and B) because I truly believe that Little League and organized sports are a very important part of our children's lives.

To illustrate this I would like to share a story that is based on events I encounter at work. I work for a non-profit company that provides permanent housing for the homeless and mentally ill. I run the maintenance department, fixing toilets for the greater good. This is the story of a fictitious character named Billy. To protect the identity of some very fragile people, the events in this sorry are actually taken from the stories of several different tenants and combined, with a little fictional glue, to make one story.

In my 9 years with Ballard Little League I have been a coach, manager, umpire, board member, vice president of this or that, pitching coach, field groomer and tournament director. The best part of it all has been the interactions, good and bad, with kids and their parents. In the middle of the season, when you are trying to balance work, family needs and Little League, it is easy to lose sight of what it's all for, not to mention losing sight of the car keys, the phone bill and the beautiful woman to whom I am lucky enough to share this craziness.

One day at work a women approached me in the hallway and asked to be let into a tenant's room. Her ID badge showed that she worked for King County Mental Health. I called the building manager and got permission to let her into the apartment she was asking about. She explained that the tenant, Billy, was in the hospital and she was his caseworker. Billy had asked her to collect some of his belongings to make him more comfortable while he was in the hospital.

When I let her in, the first thing she picked up was a small trophy. As she put it in the box she had brought, she began to tell me Billy's story. Billy's mom was addicted to crack cocaine. When Billy was born, the amount of cocaine in his body was nearly lethal. He was left with permanent brain damage and a long road ahead of him. After some time in the hospital and foster care (and a trip to rehab for his mother) he was returned to his mother's care. When he was four, his mother was arrested he was in foster care again. After another trip to rehab, he was back to mom again. When he was six, his mother sold him to man she met in a bar for $600 and some crack.

Now you can imagine what a man who purchases a child in a bar might want with said boy. During his nearly three years with this man his job was to lure other boys for his captor. Amazingly enough, this terrible man actually enrolled him in school, under his real name and no-one was the wiser.

Eventually Billy's captor was arrested for molesting a boy in the bathroom at a department store. For Billy, who was exhibiting very severe psychological problems, his return to foster care was less than successful. After several placements he was placed in a group home in Kent. This home, which is chartered for at risk youth 16 and under is run by a bear of a man who believed in two things: keep them safe and keep them busy with sports.

At 11 years old, Billy found himself on a Little League team in the Minors (now called AAA) in Kent. The year went by. He learned to catch and throw a little. He got a trophy.

The trophy in the box.

In the following year, Billy's psychotic episodes became sever enough that he could no longer live in the group home. He lived in an institution until he was sixteen. Released into foster care, only marginally responding to meds, he was on the streets of Seattle within months. He lived his life on our streets until he was 25. A social worker convinced him to qualify for housing and treatment and now he lives with us. He has good days and bad days, some really bad days.

His caseworker held up his Little League trophy and said, "This is what we use to bring Billy back." It is his "Happy place," his home base, the memory he uses to calm himself when the voices come.

Billy's memory isn't of a great play or a big hit. It is a memory of sitting on the bench with his buddies, laughing about a kid on the other team who had boogers hanging out of his nose. It is a moment of a normal kid's life, the kind of life our kids get to have because they don't live in Billy's world.

I was a coach for a lot of years and I learned that, if you have 12 kids on a team, at least two of them have some serious hardship in their lives. Now, I'm sure that very, very few of them will experience what Billy experienced (we can only hope), but I've had kids who were drug effected like Billy, have had to miss a game because a family member was in jail and a host of other things.

On the ball field, for a few hours at a time, the world made sense and there was a snack at the end.

I truly believe that it is our highest calling to "Keep them safe and keep them busy." Maybe along the way we can teach them something about baseball and something about life and maybe just love them just a little.

Mickey Niland is umpire in chief of the Ballard Little League and may be reached via bnteditor@robinsonnews.com