Murrysville travel ball teams seeing success in covid-shortened season
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When Mike Ruane of the Franklin Regional Haymakers 11U travel ball team hit a walk-off home run to win the Mt. Lebanon 11U-A Tournament on July 26, circumstances would typically dictate a crowd of teammates waiting for him at home plate.
The 2020 travel ball season has been anything but typical, though.
“The kids love the sport, and we were all upset that we had a season that normally starts in April and was delayed until June,” said Dominic Mitchell, coach for the Franklin Regional Haymakers 11U travel team, part of the Franklin Regional Athletic Association. “We tried to make the best of a strained situation for the kids, because that’s what it’s really about.”
That included a host of health and safety measures, including limits on fan attendance, liberal use of hand sanitizer, cleaning products for the dugouts and more.
“Coaches would throw in the balls for their team as needed when they were in the field,” Mitchell said. “Our umpires were stationed behind the pitcher’s mound, which was a bit of an adjustment.”
Patrick Murtha, head coach for the FRAA’s 9U team — which won a travel tournament in Baldwin on July 20 — said leagues were in the dark for most of the spring.
“It was pretty tough,” he said. “We entered as many tournaments as we could in the short time frame we had.”
Those tournaments would have to be in Western Pennsylvania, however.
“We went to four regional tournaments this year,” Mitchell said. “It was something that the coaching staff and parents discussed, and when it was all said and done, we decided to stay in-state and target tournaments within the Pittsburgh area.”
Murtha’s team had one out-of-state trip planned, to a tournament in Sandusky, Ohio.
“But Ohio shut it down,” he said.
Over and above traveling and sharing a field with another team, there was also the matter of intra-team health and safety, for rosters full of children who more than likely haven’t seen one another for most of the summer months.
“Trying to reinforce social distancing is a task in itself,” Mitchell said. “Our baseball families had a certain comfort level with us being around one another, and that was probably the number-one issue we had at the beginning.”
Murtha said he was just glad to see his team get back onto the field.
“In May, we thought sports were dead,” he said. “We didn’t even know about fall and winter, let alone summer. We worked hard this winter, with a lot of our families training at Grind 24/7 (on Old William Penn Highway). So we’re glad they were able to take advantage of that training.”
For more on the FRAA’s travel ball season, see FRAAsports.org.