There is nothing more beautiful to a sports fan than watching a kid dust off his cleats and lace up for the first time in the spring. I mean, that sentence alone sounds like a Normal Rockwell painting, doesn’t it?
Last Saturday certainly felt like one.
With our sunglasses back on, our gloves on our hands and baseball hats salvaged from the bottom of the trunk, Koa partnered with the Nationals Youth Baseball Academy to put on the inaugural baseball clinic at their facility in Southeast. The clinic participants came in every shape, age, size, and experience level. From Southeast DC to suburban Maryland to rural Virginia, an entire nation of baseball-fanatics joined together as we shook off those winter cobwebs for the first time and helped break in the Baseball Academy’s facility.
Koa’s 2014 New Year’s resolution is to get more involved in the community and this couldn’t have been a better way to kick off the spring. We’re grateful for the opportunity to have run this free clinic and excited to be working so closely with such a positive organization, the Nats. We’ve watched the Nationals Youth Baseball Academy dream their mission, build their facility, hire their staff and, now, we couldn’t be happier for them as they set their plan into action with the launching of their baseball academy.
In addition to providing after school baseball/softball programs, the academy provides free tutoring, mentoring as well help along with dinner for roughly 40 2nd and 3rd graders Monday-Friday. Their state of the art fields, batting cages, classrooms and community venues are beautiful and, more importantly, the people running these programs are high-energy, passionate, compassionate and, pretty darn inspiring. The baseball clinic was a fun, single-day activity, but these are people who have dedicated their lives to helping bring the game we all love to communities where it could really thrive. Big ups to all the staff!
And big ups to all the Koa coaches who volunteered their time (we know sunny Saturdays have been hard to come by recently) and energy in helping start the spring off right. Let’s build on this community-driven momentum as we look to start another great season — on and off the field.
