A Detroit youth baseball league's former players are coaching a new generation

If baseball is America's national pastime, then little league may be its future.

That's the way the volunteer organizers and coaches of the Rosedale Grandmont Baseball League in Detroit look at it, anyway. Yes, they say, their league, like so many others, is about playing, watching and elevating the game — but it also is about much more.

For 30 years — not counting the year the season was canceled on account of the pandemic — the league has been teaching neighborhood kids about teamwork, leadership and sportsmanship, qualities essential for success in the game and just about anything else.

"We make a connection with the kids, boys and girls, and take an interest in them, who they are and who they want to become," the local league's commissioner, Chris Gregory, 59, said, adding the sport brings families and the community together. "We help them mature, develop and grow."

As the weather seems to finally warm and the threat of catching COVID-19 appears to be waning, many youth baseball teams, like this one, are returning to their fields with swagger. Rosedale Grandmont's Opening Day on Saturday began with — what else? — a parade led by the Cass Tech High School marching band. And as if on cue, the light rain stopped just as they got started. The short route ended at the neighborhood's community center. A hot pancake breakfast and a freshly raked diamond awaited them.

This league, the founders note, began in the backyard of parents who are still on the board, and over the years it has faced its share of adversity. In some ways, it is different from the idealized suburban Little Leagues, but in others, it is much the same.

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The league gives about 300 kids, as young as 3 and as old as 16, a place to burn off energy and foster ambitions — dreams, more like it — of becoming the next Willie Horton, Alan Trammell or Miguel Cabrera.

But Gregory, who also coaches and put three sons through the league, said he also wants his players to know "the odds for somebody to make it into the pros in baseball are better for that same person to be a doctor, to be a lawyer."

And, he added, as much as he prepares them for games, he also aims to prepare them for life.

Founding a league of their own

Pete Schneider, the 39-year-old volunteer coach of the Rosedale Grandmont Monarchs, arrived at Tuesday's practice, with his 7-year-old daughter, Maya, who is on his team, in tow. His dad, Ken Schneider, was already there with the team uniforms.

It was cold and wet after a day of rain showers.

Hours earlier, parents had asked Pete Schneider if he was going to postpone the evening practice. He considered it, he said, but checked the weather: The rain was expected to stop by then. The players also, he added, really needed the practice before their first game — and their uniforms.

Schneider played catch with Maya while they waited for her teammates to arrive.

The coach's younger daughter, Jade, 4, is playing T-ball this year on another team.

Carlton Watson, who also has children playing in the league — C.J, 7; Christian, 5; and Charlotte, 3 — said that baseball teaches them hand-eye coordination and how to focus and listen, and that translates to what they have to do in school, and later, in the workplace.

"Right now, it's picking flowers, kicking dirt and trying not to get hit with the ball," Watson, 38, said. "But baseball, really, is a discipline sport. In the outfield, when no balls are coming, you have to wait, pay attention; you have to listen to the coach and at the end of the game you shake hands, and learn sportsmanship."

In the 1990s, Ken Schneider, 68, a retired attorney who grew up playing Little League baseball, organized the league with his wife, Mary, who is the league's secretary, and other neighborhood parents. It was in their yard, Schneider said, that folks first started talking about whether they should have their own teams.

The thinking, he said, was this: Parents who loved and played baseball as kids wanted their children to have that experience, too. So, they created their own league, which originally was affiliated with Little League. For years, the Schneiders watched their sons and daughters play, and then, when their kids became adults, they watched them coach.

All four of the couple's children — Pete, Anna, 37; Ellie, 35; and Henry, 32 ― played in the league.

What baseball gave them, Schneider explained, was time together as a family, a love of the game, lifelong friends, confidence to try new things and values and skills that benefit them in their jobs and lives now. Three of their children are lawyers and one works for the Red Cross.

Little League and the big city

In 1939, Carl Stotz — who played ball with his young nephews —  started Little League in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He said he just wanted to provide an organization for kids to play with some adult supervision. It quickly grew into something much bigger.

Little League is now one of the world's largest organized youth sports programs, and Williamsport, which hosts the Little League World Series, is where players all over the globe hope to end up.

In 2021, thousands of Downriver residents lined the streets of Taylor to celebrate the Little League World Series winners as they rode in the back of pickups to Heritage Park. Police vehicles led the parade, lights flashing and sirens blaring. The city threw the players a homecoming like nothing the young champs had ever seen.

In many ways, the history of Little League has mirrored the history of America, fraught with its struggles with race equality, gender equality and now social and economic equality.

For years, Little League was only for mostly white boys. It gradually became racially integrated, but with many struggles. Then, in the early 1950s, a girl, Kay Johnson, cut her hair, adopted the nickname Tubby, and earned her way on a team.

But she was forced to quit, and girls were officially prohibited from playing in Little League until 1974.

More recently, parents nationwide have raised concerns about how money is affecting youth sports.

About five years ago, Ken Schneider said, the Rosedale Grandmont board decided to break with Little League, concluding that its recruiting rules were too restrictive. Little League sets geographical boundaries for leagues in which players have to live. It means that the local teams can no longer play in Little League tournaments.

"Little League just never got it when it came to baseball in the city," Ken Schneider said. "By that, I mean, they continue with this idealized version of American society where people live in towns of 20,000 people and all of the kids play baseball."

Big city teams, he said, are different. They often don't have the same interest or perfect fields to play on.

The Rosedale Grandmont league, Schneider said, has decided it never wants to tell kids who want to play that they can't.

The league's next generation

The Detroit league is different from some suburban ones in other ways, too.

Girls and boys play on the same teams. Parents, like Kellie and Christopher Dixon, 44 and 54, of Redford, said that's good for the kids, and is helping change perceptions among both genders of what girls and women can do in sports and the workplace.

League organizers said they try to instill in its players a sense of pride that is connected to baseball's history that is forgotten by some fans, a time when Black players were excluded from baseball, but found, despite the racism, a way to overcome it.

The Rosedale Grandmont league has named its teams after some of the most famous and successful Negro league teams, such as the Kansas City Monarchs, which became the Negro leagues' first champions in 1924, and the Homestead Grays, which won the Negro World Series in 1948.

Kansas City Monarchs players included Jackie Robinson, who was signed by the Dodgers and became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball, and Ernie Banks, who played for the Cubs and became known as "Mr. Sunshine," for his optimism and catchphrase, "It's a beautiful day for a ballgame, so let's play two."

And the Rosedale Grandmont Monarchs coaches' jerseys have Robinson's number, 42, on the back.

For a while, the Rosedale Grandmont league commissioner said, one of the player's great-grandfathers, who was on a Negro league team, would come to games. The interested older players would flock to him and ask him to recount his glory days.

In addition to the pandemic, league volunteers said one of the biggest challenges has been enhancing and maintaining their fields. They've had to fundraise, appeal to nonprofits, and, over the years, do a lot of restoration and upkeep themselves, even in Detroit's Stoepel Park.

But, volunteers added, the effort, although frustrating and harrowing, has been worth it. It also, they said, helps teach the players other lessons: In America, you can accomplish quite a bit with persistence, hard work and self-reliance.

As the new season of youth baseball in Detroit unfolds, expect to see fans, parents and grandparents, like Mary and Ken Schneider, sitting in the stands, cheering the teams on as the next generation of young ball players, and leaders, take the field and step up to the plate.

Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Rosedale Grandmont Baseball League in Detroit teaches kids game, more