Growing, Growing, Gone!

USA Baseball Goes To Bat With More Events

By Ashley Wright

Coming into 2010, USA Baseball has a lot to live up to. Officials with the national governing body said new developments have positioned the organization as a force to be reckoned in the next decade, and the 18U National Team's gold-medal win over rival Cuba at the Pan American Championships last year resulted in back-to-back "Team of the Month" honors for a USA Baseball team in a Twitter vote. In fact, the 18U gold at the Pan American Championships, held in Barguisimeto, Venezula, was the organization's first. The U.S. team beat Cuba twice to finish 8-0 in the nine-day tournament.

And the winning doesn't stop there. The 14U team went 6-0 to win gold in the COPABE Pan Am A Championship; the college national team won the World Baseball Challenge in July; and the 16U team won gold at the IBAF AA World Youth Baseball Championships in Taiwan.

Coming into 2010, USA Baseball is poised for even more wins as officials prepare to grow programs and tournaments, according to Jake Fehling, director of media and public relations. "Our numbers are up and we are increasing the number of events we hold every year," he said. "We are making a more conscious effort to bring more programming, tournaments and events to the USA Baseball National Training Complex to give more opportunities for the top baseball players in the country to play here."

While one of the new events for this year is still under development, Fehling said the existing 16U championships model-formerly known as the Junior Olympics-is being extended to other age groups.

One major area of growth and focus this year is also increasing the amount of programming that is brought to the National Training Complex in Cary, N.C., Fehling said. "From one- and two-day tournaments and bringing in club teams from around the country to showing that we want to grow baseball in the Triangle (N.C.) region by bringing in high school teams, we really want to bring top baseball talent into the complex and grow the game."

USA Baseball will compete in a five-game Collegiate National Team series against Korea in July, with the first two games played at the National Training Complex. "Korean baseball is at an all-time high internationally," said Paul Seiler, USA Baseball executive director/CEO. "We saw it first-hand at the 2008 Beijing Olympics when Korea won the gold medal, as well as in its second place finish at the World Baseball Classic last March."

Should the Korean team stay ranked at No. 3 by the International Baseball Federation, it will be the United States' highest-ranked international opponent to visit the Triangle-area since USA Baseball's move to the region in 2003, Fehling added.

Player development will also continue to be a major focus of the organization. "That's what we're all about, beginning at the 14 and under level," Fehling said. "We run camps and clinics for kids 14 and younger all over the country, and host spring training clinics at the National Training Complex every year as a way of giving back to the (local Cary) community."

In 2009, USA Baseball rolled out the National Team Identification Series to all age groups, including 14-, 16- and 18-year-old levels, to compete for spots on the national team. "We received a lot of praise for the event," Fehling said, noting, "We rely heavily on contacts from the different regions of the country to recognize top players in their region."

In 2010, the organization is bringing together a 16U championship and other events to help further identify those top players, Fehling said. "We are really looking into increasing our programming, not to flood the market, but to be more effective with the events that we host and roll out a few others as well. Our goal at the end of the day is to find the best players for our national teams, but along the way to also continue to grow the game itself."

Women's programming will be another focused part of development initiatives in 2010, Fehling said, as USA Baseball looks to host one of the events that will pick the women's national team at the National Training Complex, as well as bring training events and camps to the West Coast. "A lot of young girls and women are playing semi-pro at the club level and are looking for opportunities to continue to play. We are working with them to offer more programming, and 2010 is one of those years we are trying to win gold again." The team captured the gold medal in the first-ever International Baseball Federation (IBAF) Women's Baseball World Cup in Edmonton, Canada, in 2004 when USA Baseball first established the Women's National Team. The team repeated as IBAF World Cup gold-medalists in 2006 in Taiwan and took home the bronze medal at the 2008 World Cup in Japan.

Starting this year, USA Baseball will implement a rolling invitation process for women players to participate in the USA Baseball Women's National Team Trials. Up to 30 players will be identified through the Women's Championship presented by USA Baseball and by recommendations from scouts, college and high school coaches and the women's baseball community, according to Fehling. Final selection process details and dates for the National Team will be available through USA Baseball when the IBAF Women's Baseball World Cup dates and location are announced.

Players can register for the Women's Championship either as a team or individually. During the five-day tournament, USA Baseball Task Force members will evaluate each player and select players to attend the 2010 USA Baseball Women's National Team Trials. The trials will feature practices and intra-squad games to determine the 18 players for the USA Baseball Women's National Team.

The National Team will compete in the 2010 Women's Baseball World Cup sponsored by IBAF. The federation debuted its Women's World Rankings last August, with the United States ranked No. 2. IBAF has also pushed to grow the sport worldwide and included a women's component when trying to get baseball reinstated for the 2016 Olympic games, which was unsuccessful.

Although unsuccessful in its Olympic hopes, IBAF and USA Baseball are seeing an international trend in the increase of interest in the sport and programming for women. Dr. Harvey W. Schiller, president, IBAF, said that there had been a great amount of talk about adding women's baseball to the Olymic proposal over the past year, but "recently the growth of the sport in places where baseball is already popular, as well as the request by new federations to increase the number of young girls playing in baseball, led us to move ahead and amend our 2016 proposal."

Currently over 30 of the IBAF's 128 member federations have a full discipline for women and they are also in the process of finalizing a committee of sports executives who will work specifically on the growth of the women's baseball worldwide. The committee will include Sandra Monteiro, the president of Baseball Portugal, as well as Andre Lachance of Baseball Canada and others, Schiller said. Currently over 500,000 young women play baseball around the world and recently Eri Yoshida became the first female to pitch in Japanese professional baseball, striking out the first batter she faced and touching off an immediate growth of young Japanese women interested in baseball.