For Dixie Youth hosts, tourney has challenges and rewards

Although Tammy Brooks and Roberta Wright were playing hookey from their concession stand duties out at Glenn Ricketts Field on Sunday afternoon, it was understandable. At this point, their other volunteer duties at the Dixie Youth “O” Zone World Series baseball tournament took precedence. They had a game to watch.

“We always volunteer to be hosts for visiting teams,” Brooks said. “We get them situated in their motel, tell them the best places to eat, give them information on some fun things to do in the area.”

But this year, Brooks and Wright were hosting the Rustburg 11-12 year-old squad, a group that is presumably quite familiar with places to eat and frolic in Central Virginia. So what then?

“We make sure they have lots of water,” Wright said.

Actually, Wright deserves an easy hosting gig. In 2007, her first meeting with the coach of a North Carolina team was at the Lynchburg General emergency room — on the trip up to Madison Heights, he had developed a scary-looking swelling in his arm.

“It was an infection, and it really looked bad,” Wright recalled. “The next day, it got bad again, and he had to go back.”

Then one of the North Carolina players almost drowned, requiring another ER vigil.

“I will say this about the Dixie Youth people,” Wright said. “All of the tournament officials showed up at the hospital and just about filled the ER. They were very concerned.”

Nothing close to that traumatic has happened yet this year, but a Texas player has already received stitches from a fall suffered while running up and down the bleachers at the opening ceremonies. Meanwhile, one of the Georgia teams lost one of its pitchers to a broken arm.

“He was jumping up and down on the bed in the motel room,” Linda Cox said.

As every parent knows, many 11- and 12-year-olds are at the intersection of youthful boisterousness and awkward growth— accidents waiting to happen. As baseball players, they come in all sizes.

“The kids from Texas always seem especially big,” Cox said. “We always joke that they probably drove themselves here. And then, some of the other kids are tiny.”

Cox is a supporter of the Madison Heights team — one of two from Virginia in the “O Zone” — but was lending moral support to Rustburg in its game with Sumter, SC.

Not far away, Dawn Stanley was standing and fidgetingas Rustburg struggled to avoid elimination. Her son, Carson, was pitching for the locals, and South Carolina’s Dawson Price was matching him pitch for pitch.

Sumter finally broke through with a run in the fourth inning, and the Rustburg fans — a sizable and vocal group that overflowed the small bleachers into a cluster of folding chairs — became more anxious in the 90-degree heat. A close call at first base went against their team, causing one man to yell over at radio broadcaster Brandon Wingfield: “Hey, say the umpires ain’t any good!”

“They just didn’t come to play last night,” said Dawn Stanley ofRustburg’s opening night loss to Texas.

It was 2-0 when the Virginians came up for their last at-bat.

With two outs, Warren Lambert singled up the middle. Sumter tried to issue an intentional walk to Stanley (a maneuver carried out by throwing four pitches wide of home plate), but Stanley reached out and whacked the first pitch over the head of the left fielder to put runners on second and third. Alas, Price then got the next batter to ground out and end the game.

“There are no losers in Dixie Youth baseball,” said one of the tournament officials afterward in a brief ceremony at the pitcher’s mound. “They’re all champions.”

In a year or so, that will probably be true. For the moment, for Rustburg, the scoreboard said otherwise. Tammy Brooks and Roberta Wright went back to the concession stand.