'The kids need something.' This York school saved baseball at the last moment. Can it last?
The boy stood alone on the edge of the baseball field beneath a wide stretch of blue sky.
He held his glove in his right hand. He waited and wondered.
Just 10 days remained for York High's baseball players to get ready for their first game. Ten days until they needed to be a team.
The freshman messaged some friends to join him on that March afternoon: “Who wants to go play baseball today?”
Finally, three classmates appeared, carrying balls and bats, laughing and chatting in Spanish. Three more soon followed. Then two others.
No one else was around.
Days after the YAIAA spring sports season had opened, York High baseball still had no coach.
So the teenagers hit ground balls to one another and took turns batting, no mind of the scraggly Small Athletic Field with a busted backstop fence and the grass littered with goose droppings. They say they want to learn the game they grew up with in their native Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, where baseball is still dreamed of and treasured.
They're ready, they say, to invest in this.
But how is York High, whose students desperately need strong sports opportunities, truly investing in them?
Despite its storied athletic tradition − the oldest and most far-reaching among YAIAA schools − York High routinely struggles to offer any type of successful program beyond football and boys' basketball. The apparent problems have only seemed to deepen over the past decade: instability in the coaching ranks and administration, financial shortcomings, academic performance and lack of player buy-in.
The state of the baseball team illustrates these ever-growing problems but also, as well, possibilities and perseverance. These kids are the only all-Hispanic sports team in the area, possibly the entire state − if they can stick together.
All they may need is the right kind of chance.
Saving a baseball team at the last moment
The white gym teacher looked over his Spanish-speaking team members as they warmed up, teenagers of all ages, sizes and skill sets.
The players counted their stretches in unison: "Uno, dos, tres! Quatro, cinco, seis! Ocho, siete ..."
Jim Bray stepped up to lead this team so the season wouldn't be canceled. No one else wanted it. He hadn't coached anything since a youth league team years ago and agreed now, only if he had bilingual help. So two school district employees, both former York High students, joined him.
Their first order was instilling a mandatory study hall each day before practice to improve grades. Then they went about gathering equipment most teams take for granted.
This sort of last-ditch save has become a common refrain at a school in need of coaches to not only build foundations but do so despite demands unlike anywhere anywhere else in the league.
“We’re all doing it for the kids, man. It’s as simple as that," said Bray, who's in his late-50s. "If there was no baseball they wouldn’t be going to the library after school and upping their grades.
“The kids need something. ... Our programs here go back forever. There were so many sports, and now we’re lucky we have four."
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Coaches, teachers, administrators and local government officials talk about how York City students are more likely to battle poverty, unstable home lives, language barriers and crime than anywhere else in York and Adams counties. A 17-year-old York High student was murdered in Penn Park in mid-March, his body found yards from where fellow students were leaving the school during an early dismissal. A week later, a 48-year-old man was found shot to death in the 700 block of West Philadelphia Street − the city's fourth fatal shooting of the month.
Sports can be a refuge and a motivator, a builder of discipline and character to shepherd students, according to Bray and his assistants.
Baseball, in particular, can resonate with these kids.
It means "everything. That's life," said assistant coach Roberto Vazquez, a York High hall monitor and van driver by day.
He grew up in Puerto Rico, playing baseball in "diaper leagues" from the time he was 3. He eventually moved to York City with family and attended York High for a year. He graduated from York Vo-Tech 20 years ago and still lives in the city.
He lost his own baseball dreams along the way.
He hopes to give his three boys a better chance now. Same for every one on this team.
"If I could get just one of these kids out of the streets, out of the hood life …" he said. "It's my passion. I just love the kids, I want to be able to support them, help them.
“You’ve got to have somebody who’s there for them, in good and bad. You’ve got to love these kids."
York High students, at one point, didn't even have a shot at baseball: The school cut the program and others a decade ago for budgetary reasons. The decision to bring it back in 2016, along with cross country, soccer, softball and competitive cheer, would prove daunting. Any kind of precious ground-base support and foundation had been wiped away.
For baseball: Who would lead and build a team with the worst facilities in the YAIAA, with no junior high feeder program and a potential language and culture barrier?
The Bearcats went 2-15 in their last two varsity seasons (2011-12) before the program dissolved − and haven't come close to winning since. A gradual recovery was set back again when COVID canceled the 2020 season.
They didn't win a game last spring.
Coaches came and went. Players didn't bother showing up for classes, no less getting good enough grades to be eligible.
Athletic director Jeff White said cultural barriers have hurt the program − trying to get students and family members to buy into the academic demands and protocols of playing scholastic baseball, and how they may be different from the Dominican and Puerto Rico.
Baseball stability, as with other sports at York High, will rely on "changing a mindset," White said. "But that's the question, how do you do that?
"You've got to be able to reach more than the students. I think the school can go way above and beyond (to help), but it's not a school problem. It's a community problem. It's getting the community to change," to offer more support.
Certainly, times are different from when York High was the largest and most dominant athletic school in the area − much more than a football or basketball school. Its swimming team not only reigned supreme in the state but was one of the best nationally. It was a regular star at the PIAA Track and Field Championships in sprints, relays and jumps. And one of the area's top baseball prospects ever, pitcher Rob Shoff, starred for the Bearcats.
But supporting fully staffed, competitive sports teams in city school districts across Pennsylvania has become increasingly difficult. What makes high school sports more challenging everywhere − funding, athlete specialization and player/coach commitment - seem only magnified in city districts where kids are more transient and, often times, concerned more about basic needs, such as where they are sleeping and eating each night.
That kind of atmosphere places a greater burden on York High coaches with time, patience and even fundraising efforts to make things work. They must somehow build faith in a ground-zero team that must quickly feed itself to provide a fighting chance, according to Ron Coursey, York High's former athletic director who now leads the sports programs at Chambersburg High.
Coursey helped oversee the reinstatement of those vanquished sports at York High in 2016-17. He also helped hire football coach Russ Stoner, who has devoted himself to revitalizing that program by driving facility improvements, off-site workout sessions and college admission preparation for his players, by any means possible. He's now opening a learning and training center for city athletes, particularly his football players.
Coursey pointed to Stoner as an example of the approach needed.
"I would challenge all coaches, that's what it takes to be successful, it's not only required, it's demanded. I saw it for years," Coursey said. "It's a different animal coaching in an inner-city school, the demands of the job are different. You've got to be a mentor, a tutor, a second father, an Uber driver, a counselor, a therapist."
Certainly, some in the community are willing to help − if a team can just hold itself together.
The York Revolution recently donated to the baseball program to buy equipment. They also are willing to work with the district for use of its heated indoor batting cages and even its stadium to play games, team President Eric Menzer said.
York City Little League officials have helped renovate Small Field in years past and are loaning a pitching machine.
Even former York High grads have taken to social media to procure supplies for the team, particularly cleats and gloves that players from other schools usually purchase on their own. They want the school to invest more in programs beyond football and basketball.
York High owned a varsity baseball budget of $14,532 for the 2020-21 academic year, lower than most districts around them such as West York ($37,917), Dover ($18,108) and York Suburban ($15,581). Reading, another inner-city program, budgeted $28,854 on baseball.
Large chunks of those West York ($21,545) and Reading ($8,907) baseball budgets, its worth noting, were spent on facility upgrades.
White, York High's AD, said there is an early-stage proposal to replace the expansive grass softball and baseball fields at Small Athletic Field −both lacking even outfield fences − with artificial turf. A non-grass surface would discourage the flocks of nuisance geese from defecating across the fields and even make regular maintenance easier for the school district, he said.
However, he and school officials offered no timeline or cost estimates for the project.
For now, the York High Bearcats must simply play where they can.
Winning despite not scoring a run
This last-minute baseball team looked promising enough to start its season opener.
After getting three quick outs in the first inning, the Bearcats jogged off the field to an impromptu celebration of high-fives and back-slaps and rousing cheers in Spanish from their backups on the bench.
Their center fielder is a natural who swings the bat like a whip.
Their shortstop owns a rifle for an arm and plays with the kind of flair you'd expect from a kid who spent time at a baseball academy in the Dominican.
The pitching was steadier than expected for a debut.
But it's all still mostly raw and unpolished. The infielders threw the ball all over the place and even ran into each other while chasing after pop flies. Almost all gave only hesitant swings at the plate, if they swung at all.
Their inspired cheers died by the time they fell hopelessly behind in the fourth inning, something coaches Vazquez and Christian Miranda addressed in fervent Spanish after it was over.
They lost 12-0 to West York.
And yet they still won, in a way, their coaches proclaimed.
The players put arms around each other as they listened to their postgame lectures and eventually walked away with heads up, mingling with family and friends who waited around.
They still cut a sharp image in their brand-new pinstripe uniforms with blue caps and orange socks.
And they would practice again the following day.
Play another game two days after that.
For now, simply getting everyone together in their proper places with good enough grades felt uplifting. There was hope, again.
"My challenge was not playing against West York right now, my challenge was making it happen, making it possible for these kids. And we made it," Vazquez said, smiling big before pausing. "We made it! We made it to our first game. In 10 days we made it happen.
"From nothing," he said, "we became something."
Frank Bodani covers sports for the York Daily Record and USA Today Network. Contact him at fbodani@ydr.com and follow him on Twitter @YDRPennState.