One of the former Fulbrighters to Namibia, Steve Grey, had the idea to start a baseball team during his stint here. Steve’s kids also attended Windhoek International and so naturally that is where he chose to base the team. He went through considerable effort to get equipment shipped over here since Cricket and not Baseball is what is practiced in these here parts. He was in contact with a little league team back home in his native Michigan. They sent uniforms, balls, bats and gloves among other things. When his tour was up he needed someone to whom he could hand over the reins. Naturally this then fell to Reid and his Fulbright colleague, Larkin Powell.
“The team” is an extension of WIS’s after school activities program, so it consists of just about anybody and his brother from year 4 on up. There’s also a number of boys who participate from a nearby orphanage associated with the school, Orlindi. Kelly usually runs over there and fetches the boys, typically about 6 or 7 in number, who then pile up in the back of the Polytechnic’s Toyota Corolla. They pile back in after practice to return.
The practice field may see 20 to 25 kids at any given time. The numbers vary depending on what else is going on that day. There hasn’t been a day when someone new hasn’t shown up and asked to play. Play, for us, has been the main objective of this all so international of exercises. We’ve tried to give the kids some basic skills and a general background concerning the rules, but we’ve also just approached this with the idea that it should be fun. Given that we’ve got kids from Israel, the US, the Netherlands, Iceland, and Namibia (just to name a few places) and from all income levels—the sons and daughters of ambassadors to orphans—it’s been an amazing lesson in the power of sport to unite all participants in a common sense of purpose and in the spirit of having a little fun together no matter how diverse their backgrounds might be.
We, of course, immediately thought about a role for LSU’s Baseball Program, National Collegiate Champs, in all of this. Reid wrote to Coach Mainieri and requested any kind of leftovers from the camps LSU runs for aspiring young athletes. Coach Mainieri’s reply was prompt and he put his assistant, Will Davis, right on it. Will had a bunch of t-shirts and caps all emblazoned with the LSU logo sent over FedEX for our rag-tag group of budding baseball aficionados. We held somewhat of a lottery among the kids in order to distribute them since there were an unequal number of shirts vs. caps. My brother also sent over a couple dozen baseballs and it felt like Mardi Gras handing these out. I was completely mobbed by the little munchkins. Although the shirts tended to run to the extra-large sizes, the kids were tickled pink with their acquisitions. They were especially pleased after Reid explained to them just who the LSU Tigers were and what kind of a baseball legacy they have. Who knows, maybe one of these days one of these kids will end up in Louisiana batting for the Tigers. There are a few of them that can really whack the ball.
Unfortunately, we’ve yet to find someone to whom we can now hand the reins and time is running short on us. We’ve harassed everyone we know, but we’re not yet ready to give up on it!
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