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Behind the scenes on the road to Williamsport with Small Ball: Little League Stories By Carol Wonsavage
The Aptos, Calif., Little League team, which went all the way to the Little League Baseball World Series Championship in Williamsport, Pa., is featured in the Penn State Public Broadcasting-produced documentary Small Ball: Little League Stories. Andrew Kolker (left) and Louis Alvarez, are producers of Small Ball: Little League Stories, to be presented nationally on PBS by Penn State Public Broadcasting in April. Photo by Andrew Kolker Tracy Vosburgh, station manager of Penn State Public Broadcasting, is executive producer of Small Ball: Little League Stories. Campus Photography	What are the odds of choosing a small-town Little League team in the spring that will go all the way to the Little League Baseball World Series Championship in August? Award-winning filmmakers Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker did just that in their documentary Small Ball: Little League Stories to be presented by Penn State Public Broadcasting, WPSX-TV, for national telecast on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in April.   The documentary takes viewers along for a nailbiting six-week road trip with the Aptos, Calif., Little League team, their inspired coaches and their impassioned parents on the trail to the Emerald City of Little League Baseball: Williamsport, Pa. With 172,000 chartered teams in the United States and 11,000 abroad, only 16, eight from the United States and eight from abroad, survive to reach the World Series Championship. In 2002, the Aptos team of 11- and 12-year-olds was one of those 16, and the filmmakers were there for the entire ride.   “We wanted to find an all-star team and follow it, get to know the players, parents and coaches and see how far they would go,” Kolker said. “We heard the team in Aptos was pretty good. The kids had been playing together since they were 5 years old, and this seemed to be their year. Most of the kids came from a team that had gone undefeated in the regular season. But tournament competition is so intense, you would think that it would be just a matter of time until they finally lost. But Aptos didn’t lose. They just refused to lose.”   Small Ball: Little League Stories traces the Aptos team’s quest over four months, including the very different worlds of the players, the coaches and the enthusiastic and dedicated parents following along. In the film, the team becomes a metaphor for the 2.7 million youngsters in 104 countries and all 50 U.S. states who partake of this springtime ritual. The Aptos team won its district, sectional, state and West Regional tournaments and finally reached the World Series Championship.   “One of the things that became part of the story is the non-stop travel,” Alvarez said. “When you are winning a lot, you don’t know when it will end and when you can go home. If you win one round, you immediately go to the next round and then the next. At the Regional tournament and the World Series, we followed one story about the players and their coaches who are in a compound and another about the parents in motels keeping the laundry done and trying not to be nervous wrecks. The parents literally didn’t know where they would be sleeping the next evening. It was a wild six-week road trip.”   Small Ball: Little League Stories highlights many aspects of the Little League experience. It profiles Basil Tarasko, a Ukrainian American and retired math teacher from New York. A self-styled “Johnny Appleseed” of Little League—armed with donated bats, balls, gloves and even uniforms—he teaches baseball to youngsters in rural Ukraine, where the game is largely unknown. The documentary visits with Satchel Paige Little Leaguers, an inner-city team in Washington, D.C., Hispanic coaches in Brooklyn, N.Y., and with all-star coach Frank Poleto in the suburbs of Albany, who has built his house around a batting cage for his son and his teammates.   Small Ball: Little League Stories was brought to the filmmakers by Tracy Vosburgh, executive producer of the documentary and station manager for Penn State Public Broadcasting.   “As a mother myself, I knew very well how important Little League is to many families, not to mention our coverage area of central Pennsylvania, home of the Little League Baseball World Series Championship in Williamsport,” Vosburgh said.   “Little League fits right in with our broader interest in American society,” Kolker said. “It’s a game, yes, and one played by kids and adults. You can find out a lot about family relationships in America by looking at Little League.”   Small Ball: Little League Stories captures the passion millions have for this American institution and the effect the game has on the lives of generations of youngsters.