Play ball! PONY baseball eyes the Mid-Peninsula's Little League stronghold Play ball! PONY baseball eyes the Mid-Peninsula's Little League stronghold (July 28, 2004)

By Andrea Gemmet
Almanac Staff Writer

It's the quintessentially American pastime, able to evoke nostalgia for warm summer days and the smell of freshly mown grass in people who have never even lifted a bat. It's the idea of simpler times, Dad and Junior playing catch in the front yard, chants of "Hey batter-batter-batter" from the infield, the sun gleaming on a ponytail sticking out the back of a baseball cap.

If there ever was a time when youth baseball was as simple and uncomplicated as signing up your child with the local Little League just before the season started, those days are long gone. Little League is far from the only game in town. Kids looking for serious competitive baseball can play year-round for a number of club teams that travel to tournaments all over the country.

Parents of younger kids must sift through organizations with different philosophies and different rules. And if you don't like your local Little League, well, there's always PONY baseball.

An acronym for Protect Our Nation's Youth, PONY is a smaller organization, with a lower profile that Little League. Founded in 1954, PONY, like Little League, is a nonprofit, volunteer-run organization based in Pennsylvania that serves kids ages 5 to 18. A big presence in the North Peninsula, and in Santa Clara County, PONY had virtually no presence -- up until this year -- on the Midpeninsula, historically a Little League stronghold.

Steven Yecies, a Woodside resident and recent transplant from Los Altos, organized a postseason all-star team of 7- and 8-year-olds from Woodside, Atherton, Menlo Park and Portola Valley that took third place in the PONY regional tournament earlier this month.

Mr. Yecies, who coached his four sons' Mountain View-Los Altos PONY baseball teams, says he started the team after becoming dissatisfied with his youngest boy's experience in the Alpine-West Menlo Little League.

"We weren't very happy with it on a lot of levels," he says. "It was a couple of notches down from my experience (with PONY)."

Uneven teams, negative coaching, and a lower level of play for the kids are some of the concerns he says he had. Other parents he talked to, he says, share his concerns.

"I think the local preference is to seek to upgrade the local Little League or change its charter to PONY, but if that is not possible and there is sufficient interest in PONY baseball, we will start a full-fledged league in this area," Mr. Yecies says.

Such a decision isn't unheard of -- Los Gatos just shifted their 800-kid league's charter from Little League to PONY starting next year, says Mr. Yecies.

Doing it for the kids

As with any youth baseball organization, there's a great deal of variation from league to league, depending on how it is run and the people involved.

"They're all out to provide good, wholesome experiences for kids," says Kerry Bradford, president of the Menlo-Atherton Little League. "The focus is supposed to be for the good of kids, and in theory be a less-competitive (atmosphere) than an Oracle or Microsoft, but when you get to the local level, there can be a sort of a fiefdom, and that creates some bitterness."

Youth sports has never been trouble-free -- there will always be pushy parents, profane spectators and ego-crushing coaches from time to time -- but disputes usually aren't of interest to anyone other than the families and children on the teams.

That wasn't the case with the Alpine-West Menlo Little League's decision to drop out of the traditional Fourth of July cross-town championship game with Menlo-Atherton this year. A scheduling problem meant both Majors Division teams wouldn't be able to play their starting pitchers in the cross-town game if they wanted them to play in the subsequent all-star games, because of Little League rules to protect pitchers' arms.

Although the 43-year-old game continued in a different form when Menlo-Atherton fielded two teams that played at Willow Field, the resulting brouhaha over the forfeit reached a much wider audience.

It's a decision that smacked of letting the adults' desire to win supercede the kids' interest in learning and gaining experience in baseball, Mr. Yecies says.

Alpine's reasons

Timing and logistics kept the league from being able to field a team on the Fourth of July, but "it's a temporary glitch," says Alpine-West West Little League president Maureen Brown.

"There's no doubt in my mind that it will all be back on again next year," she says.

Planning got off to late start because of confusion about where the game would be held -- construction closed the field at Menlo Park's Burgess Park where the game is traditionally held -- and this year's creation of a new Alpine-West Menlo all-star team of 11-year-olds, Ms. Brown says. Fielding a new all-star team takes a tremendous amount of work, and nine of the 12 kids on Alpine's championship Professional Insurance team were on the all-star team, she says.

Several Alpine-West Menlo board members are committed to working with their counterparts at Menlo-Atherton to organize next year's game, she says.

For many of Alpine's families who live in Portola Valley and Woodside, the July Fourth game in Menlo Park is not a big deal - "they've never gone, and are not a part of it," Ms. Brown says.

The competition issue

"Sports is competitive by nature," says Chandler Eason, coach of Lutticken's, the Menlo-Atherton champions in the majors division. "We all like to win, we all live in the Bay Area and we all want to be winners. That said, we want to bring all players up to the best level, and have a good team, not just good players."

It brings up some of the quintessential questions in youth sports: Where do you find the balance between being competitive and being inclusive? Can positive coaching produce winning teams? Do you cater to the star players, and leave the less-talented kids warming the bench?

Outside of the unapologetically competitive club teams, these are questions that both Little League and PONY try to address, although the strategies vary from league to league. Both set a minimum number of innings that all children on a team must play. PONY was an early adherent of the Stanford University-based Positive Coaching Alliance's tenets, and requires its coaches to be trained in its techniques, says Mr. Yecies.

"We need positive people to be coaching, we don't need people who can't handle kids to be coaching," says Abel Hernandez, the Northern California division director for PONY. "If (coaches) set a bad example, the kids think that's an OK way to behave."

Little League has a bill of rights for parents, players and coaches that also outlines positive, respectful behavior, says Mr. Bradford, and for the past several years, the Menlo-Atherton league required coaches to attend PCA training.

"What it preaches is the need to provide five positives for every one negative, in order for kids not to have a debilitating psychological experience," Mr. Bradford says. "You don't think about it when you're out there, but in baseball there are a lot of opportunities to critique -- as a hitter, you fail more than you succeed."

Menlo-Atherton dropped the requirement for PCA training this past year, as many of the coaches had attended before, and it can be "a little sugary," he says.

"We did have some episodes this year that made me think maybe we shouldn't have bypassed it," Mr. Bradford muses, mentioning that over the years he's faced some "crazy, how-could-people-be-like-that" situations.

Alpine-West Menlo Little League has also sent coaches to PCA training in the past, although not in the 1-1/2 years she has been league president, says Ms. Brown.

"We're constantly making improvements," she says. "We want people coaching for the right reasons -- they love baseball and want to help kids love baseball. Sometimes we find people are not doing it for those reasons, and we try to work it out."

Positive coaching is the only way to instill a love of the game in players, she says. Kids who are being yelled at and berated will not want to continue playing baseball, especially at age 13, when there is a huge drop-off in participation in youth sports, Ms. Brown says.

"We do our best to get the right coaches in the first place, but just like in the real world, nobody's perfect at hiring," she says. "The bulk of our coaches are doing a great job."

Being inclusive

Individual leagues have some flexibility in setting more inclusive standards. Mr. Bradford says the Menlo-Atherton league's practice of batting every player on the roster, not just the nine players in the field, for its age 12-and-under teams has now become an official option for Little Leagues across the nation.

"We're not focused on trying to build the next Barry Bonds in our league," he says. "We're trying to give 400 or so kids a positive experience."

Being inclusive and winning are not mutually exclusive, according to Mr. Yecies' experience. The WAMP PONY All-Stars make sure all players bat at least half of a game's six innings, he says.

"You can accomplish both if you really work at improving all of the kids on the team," he says, pointing out that the team ended up third in Northern California and still stuck to its principals of rotating all the kids, rather than just playing their best nine.

"We need to realize this is a game, these are kids, and they may not make the major leagues," says Mr. Eason. "Our job is to build the kids up, teach them the game of baseball and have them improve."

Mr. Hernandez says Mr. Yecies did a terrific job introducing PONY to the Midpeninsula.

"We're looking for bigger and better things in that area. Maybe PONY can grow a little," he says.

As for which league is more competitive than the other, Mr. Hernandez won't say.

"I'm not going to say we're better than Little League. I'm not going to put down any youth organization," he says. "We're all volunteers trying to have something for children to do."

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