MILL CREEK – With a history of success, the Mill Creek Little League program begins each season with high expectations for the organization as a whole and for each of its member teams.
This year, though, Mill Creek outdid even itself.
Consider, Mill Creek sent five All-Star teams to the recent district baseball tournaments, which included rival squads from throughout Snohomish County. Five Mill Creek teams won district titles, resulting in five Mill Creek teams advancing to state tournaments, which will start or have already started this week.
Such a feat – a 5-for-5 district sweep – ”is unprecedented,” said Mill Creek Little League president Tom Davis. ”It’s such an accomplishment that I don’t even know what to say.”
Unlike ”select” teams, which can recruit players from anywhere, Little League teams are restricted by geographic boundaries. Mill Creek, for instance, draws its players from essentially the area that feeds Jackson High School.
This season, Mill Creek had close to 1,000 kids playing baseball or softball, making it one of the largest programs in the county. The youngsters begin as young as 5 years old, starting with tee ball – which is boys and girls together, although girls eventually break off to play softball – and continuing up to Senior Little League for ages 15-16.
All the teams play regular league schedules, but beginning with ages 9-10 the leagues close their seasons with All-Star tournaments. The postseason begins with the district tournament, and the champions of those events – and for the boys, it was all Mill Creek this year – advance to the state tournament.
Mill Creek’s 9-10s (in Chehalis) and 12s (Auburn) will play their first state tournament games today, while the 11s (Centralia), the 13-14 juniors (Seattle) and the 15-16 seniors (Vancouver) are already under way.
For the 12-year-old team, the state tournament is the next step on a road that could lead to the annual Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa. To get to Williamsport, Mill Creek would have to win the state tournament, then win a regional tournament against state champs from the western United States.
”This age group won state last year (as 11 year olds), so the expectations are pretty high,” said Rob Brown, manager of the 12-year-old team. ”I would not say we’re expected to win state, but we’ve got as good a chance as any team.”
Why has Mill Creek been so successful, this year as in previous years? According to Davis, it is an organization-wide commitment to excellence that players and their parents embrace. Players on the top teams practice almost every day of the week during the season, and they also play roughly twice the number of games as neighboring Little League programs.
Brown, whose 11-year-old son Sam is a first-baseman on the All-Star team, has been putting his squad through practices of up to three hours every day. It is, he said, an example ”of the dedication and expectations” that permeate the Mill Creek program, where ”coaches take their responsibility very seriously.”
Taking the job very seriously is, in fact, necessary to getting the job in the first place. Candidates must interview and be approved by the board of directors, and some hopefuls simply do not make the cut.
”I’ve been told that other leagues … almost beg people to take coaching positions,” Davis said. ”But we feel a little more strongly about the kind of expertise that we want.”
This year, he went on, Mill Creek looked into adding extra teams to give more kids opportunities to play, ”but we couldn’t find the expertise we wanted (among prospective coaches), so we didn’t form them. I feel strongly that if the teams are a little larger, especially in the younger ranks, it’s not as bad as having a coach that does not have that expertise.”
Evidently, word is getting around. The family of one player on this year’s 12-year-old team was moving to the Seattle area and the parents opted to live in Mill Creek, in part so their son could play Little League there.
”That’s a testimonial to what we have to offer,” said Davis, whose 11-year-old daughter is a two-time softball All-Star. ”But every time we move forward, another league moves in right behind us. We’re just trying to stay one step ahead of everybody else.”
There are, he admits, some folks that consider all this a bit extreme.
”People come to me all the time and say, ‘Aren’t you taking this too far. Isn’t Mill Creek Little League being too serious about baseball?’ And my response has always been that we are a competitive sport. We’re teaching kids to be competitive, and we’re also teaching them the rights and wrongs. By doing both, we think we turn out a pretty good group of kids,” Davis said.
However the state tournaments unfold, he added, this remarkable season ”has been a whirlwind for me and this league. It’s a culmination of a lot of hard work by a lot of people. It’s not just me, it’s everybody, and that includes the concession stand workers to the guys who put the fields together. There’s a lot of work to do and those people all deserve the credit.”
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