News

Wedge is a leader who looks to the future

Reggie Hayes — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:52:30 EDT

Sat., January 13, 2007

The Youngest MLB Manager will speak at Pine Valley Country Club on Friday.

Kimmel Speaks to All of Europe

Caleb Kimmel — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:52:30 EDT

The Confederation of European Baseball (CEB) invited Caleb Kimmel to be a guest speaker at the 2007 Baseball Congressional Hearings for Europe in Vilinius, Lithuania.

Kimmel hosted a motivational seminar on increasing the interest of baseball, finding and developing multi-dimensional leadership, and the Rising Star Education Baseball Program. The Rising Star Education Baseball Program has originally created by a group of baseball leadership including Steve Sotir.

There were 41 separate nations in attendance at these hearings.

POWERPOINT PRESENTATION

CEB Annual Report '07

Congressional Hearings - Nations in Attendance

World Baseball Academy in Mexico

Caleb Kimmel — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:52:30 EDT

March 2007

The World Baseball Academy traveled to Reynosa, Mexico to help bring hope and encouragement to children and families living in poverty.

Our organization was able to provide resources for local organizations in Reynosa to help support youth outreach in this area.

World Hub For Youth Baseball

Reggie Hayes — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:52:30 EDT

Their dream is for city to host clinic for kids

By Reggie Hayes of The News-Sentinel
July 7, 2007

Steve Sotir has been around the world, more than once. He's rubbed elbows with baseball legends Joe DiMaggio, Ernie Banks, Duke Snider and Sadahara Oh. He's even told Hank Aaron what to do.

Being a baseball fan, understanding what those names mean, I'm inclined to listen when Sotir talks. His interaction with Aaron came several years ago when Sotir was in Japan, running clinics at the World Children's Baseball Fair.

"Hank Aaron comes up and says 'Steve, what do you want me to do?'" Sotir said. "Hank Aaron's asking me what I want him to do! I say, 'Hank would you be able to work with some outfielders and talk a little bit about hitting?'"

Sotir, the athletic director for Woodside and Summit middle schools, told similar stories to Caleb Kimmel of Between the Lines, a baseball instructional and tournament hub located at the ASH Centre, 1701 Freeman St.

Along with me, Kimmel was enthralled by Sotir's stories about his experiences, not only with the big names of baseball, but also in teaching children the game of baseball all over the world.

To Kimmel, Sotir's presence in Fort Wayne is a godsend. And he doesn't intend to waste it.

Kimmel has a dream, already in motion, of bringing an annual international youth baseball clinic and tournament to Fort Wayne. He'd be the organizer; Sotir would be the baseball guru, and young baseball players from Fort Wayne and around the world would be the benefactors. The not-for-profit event would be called the World Baseball Academy and would bring four to eight foreign teams to the Summit City every summer.

"It sounds ridiculous, but we really have the chance to put Fort Wayne on the map globally in the baseball world, Kimmel said.

Kimmel believes the first World Baseball Academy could be in place by 2010, providing funds can be raised to bring the ASH Centre complex up to par with facilities.

To anticipate your question, yes, Kimmel is pounding the pavement for sponsorship money and donations. Merely bringing the baseball complex up to needed standards will cost a couple million dollars.

But after listening to Kimmel and Sotir talk, the idea seems worth every penny.

"If you had an Argentina kid, a Croatia kid, a Japanese kid and a Fort Wayne kid right there, together, the cross

cultural social experience would be unbelievable," Kimmel said. "Guys who have worked at the World Children's

Baseball Fair say it's the coolest thing they've ever seen."

Sotir can testify firsthand. He once served as director of development for the International Baseball Federation, running camps in Australia, Bulgaria, Curacao, Ecuador, England, Germany, Guam, Israel, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, Scotland, and Spain. He was a college coach at Georgia Southern and he worked at the

World Children's Baseball Fair five times in Japan and the United States.

In fact, he's been invited to coach at the World Children's Baseball Fair again this year, this time in Puerto Rico. Sotir says it's hard to imagine how thrilling it is to work with 250 young baseball players from 25 different countries. The world becomes a smaller place.

Kimmel got a taste of that last spring when he filled in for Sotir at a clinic in Lithuania.

If Kimmel's dream for the World Baseball Academy comes to fruition, that type of experience would be right in our backyard. Sotir's experience in teaching abroad would be the perfect fit to handle the on-the-field instruction that would make the trip worthwhile.

"I feel like my part is the easy part," Sotir said. "He's got to raise all that money to make it work. You can't bring these teams in and have average facilities."

Developing one set of fields at the ASH Centre would be the ideal because foreign teams could come into Fort Wayne, have a few days of instruction and several days of games, all at the same locale. As Kimmel and Sotir point out, a team could play against teams from three different countries within the same complex.

A group from Croatia is already interested in making the trip, but Kimmel wants to make sure the facilities are first class so that word will spread in the international community. Kimmel said the Croatia group would be willing to come to Fort Wayne as soon as 2008, but he doesn't believe the complex will be upgraded by then. A more realistic goal 2010, Kimmel said.

Ultimately, the World Baseball Academy should benefit Fort Wayne well beyond any initial investment to set the stage.

"When you bring somebody halfway around the world, you can't give them substandard facilities," Sotir said.

Guess who would use those fields the rest of the time - all of Fort Wayne."

Who knows? The next Hank Aaron or Sadahara Oh could find his lifelong motivation and love for the game with a trip to Fort Wayne.

"One team coming over could effectively tell the whole world," Kimmel said. "So when we do this the first time it has be first class."

A first-class idea is already in place. It's now a matter of others stepping up and helping to make take Fort Wayne baseball to the world, and vice versa.

WBA Newsletter

By WBA Staff — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:52:30 EDT

August 2007

Baseball's Big Dream

Reggie Hayes — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:52:30 EDT

Their dream is for city to host clicinc for kids

By Reggie Hayes
of News-Sentinel

July 2, 2007

Steve Sotir has been around the world more than once............

CLICK HERE FOR ARTICLE

Wedge feels baseball pull, even in winter

Reggie Hayes — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:52:30 EDT

He's looking ahead, with no regrets over 2007

CLICK HERE FOR NEWS ARTICLE

Eric Wedge Recognized by MLB

By Sandy Mitchell, About.com Guide to Cleveland — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:52:30 EDT

Eric Wedge Named AL Manager of the Year

Wednesday November 14, 2007:

For the second time in two days, a member of the Cleveland Indians' organization has received a post-season award. Today, manager Eric Wedge was named the American League's Manager of the Year. Not bad for one of the youngest managers in Major League Baseball.

The honor is well-deserved. Wedge led the Indians to a division championship and to league-high 96 wins during the 2007 season.

World Baseball Academy Credentials

WBA Staff — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:52:30 EDT

The World Baseball Academy Leadership

City to be home for world baseball hub

Ben Smith — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:52:30 EDT

Journal Gazette: Published: January 6, 2008 6:00 a.m.

By: Ben Smith

The game is its numbers, and so Darin Van Tassell brings you an armful, chucks them like lazy batting-practice lobs across the table here in the ASH Centre.

"A little over 40 percent of all players in Major League Baseball are from outside the United States," he'll say, in a Georgia drawl soft as a spring breeze.

And a little later: "Seventy-two percent of Japanese were in front of their television sets watching (the championship game of the 2007 World Baseball Classic)."

And, because it's apropos to all this, too: "Seventy percent of the IOC voting board is European."

Which is why baseball will be gone from the Olympics after Beijing, at least for one cycle, because Europe is the one place in the world where baseball hasn't truly caught on yet. Which is also why all those Japanese wild for baseball (and Cubans and Costa Ricans and Australians and Israelis, too) will need some place to train and get better and feed a game everyone swears is about to go as crazy internationally as basketball did a decade or so ago.

"It's bursting at the seams," Van Tassell says.

Enter the World Baseball Academy. And, odd as it might seem,

enter Fort Wayne. The World Baseball Academy is the brainchild of

Van Tassell, Larry Bryant, Steve Sotir and Caleb Kimmel, and the idea behind it is to unify international player development into a multiweek training session on one site ("One-stop shopping," Sotir calls it). The one site is the ASH Centre in Fort Wayne.

What this means is, very soon, Fort Wayne could be the place to train for every national baseball federation in the world.

So why Fort Wayne, of all places?

The easy answer is that Sotir lives here. He is, after all, the former director of player development for the International Baseball Federation. Oh, and he's the former director of the Olympic Education Training Center. Oh, and he's been the IBAF camp director in no less than 14 nations, from Guam to Germany.

He's also been putting on clinics for international players for 20 years at Georgia Southern University. That's where he met Van Tassell, who was just named director of the Olympic baseball tournament in Beijing. And it's where he met Bryant, who's been the IBAF head coach for five different countries, including the U.S.

Those ties do bind. And so, welcome to Fort Wayne.

"We have the tournament venues established so they can grow," says Kimmel, who owns Between The Lines, the principal local liaison for the World Baseball Academy.

"We have the facilities secured. The last thing we need is a community effort to bring it up to world-class standard."

For that, Kimmel, Van Tassell, Bryant and Sotir spent Friday and Saturday pitching local business and political leaders. Kimmel didn't talk dollars Saturday, but he figured it will take one more quality playing field - the AHS Centre has three - to fill the needs of the WBA.

I don't know how this can be a bad thing, frankly. The more baseball diamonds, the better, that's my basic philosophy. Build enough of them, I figure, and there won't be room enough (or time enough, or inclination enough) to fight the wars mankind always seems to find it necessary to fight.

Fort Wayne as international baseball mecca?

Yeah, I know it sounds weird. But you listen to Van Tassell long enough, and you look at the credentials he and Bryant and Sotir and Kimmel bring to the table, and you combine that with the robust growth of international baseball - the Japanese actually declared a national holiday the day it played for the World Baseball Classic title - and the fact that all that passion needs some way to sustain itself ...

"It's that perfect storm of things coming together," Van Tassell says.

Break out the rain gear, then.