April 2023:
Things are returning to normal in Uganda. The school year started in early
February and will end in late November. There will be a three week break
between semesters in May which gives us a chance to once again host our
Little League tournament. During the week of May 8, we will host the girls
12 and under softball tournament. The following Monday through Friday, we
will host the boys 12 and under Little League Tournament. We doubt the
winner of our tournaments will be allowed to continue on and travel to
Poland for the European/Africa tournament that will allow the winner to
continue on to the Little League World Series, as the last we heard, Uganda
is banned from participating as we plan to win if we have to pay the $35,000
cost to get there. Little League, I guess is still studying breaking Africa
away from Europe, which they apparently have been doing ever since 2007.
Uganda will go on, as in the years before the pandemic, we participated in
the RBI tournaments in Florida with both boys and girls teams in 2018 and
2019. We have also been approached by Babe Ruth League, which appears where
we will be going in the future.
In regard to Little League, Uganda hurt the AVRS school as the government
shut the schools down for two years and thus the only people who got hurt
are the students who basically had two years taken away from their lives.
Where we were able to get 12 year olds to enroll in our secondary school,
now they have become 14 year olds. The Dodgers are trying to fix the problem
for the next 4 or 5 years, by brining Primary students and helping them get
through Primary school 7 so they can become our S1 students of next year at
age 12. These primary students will be representing our school in this
year's tournament.
Pitch in for Baseball is really an amazing organization We have been working
with them for at least 17 years now, and they keep sending us more and more
equipment. This is the only way baseball and softball equipment has been
coming into Uganda. Every year, they ask us what we need and they pack it
and we pay to ship it to Uganda. As far as we know, no store sells baseball
equipment in Uganda. We started out with basically one large pallet about 20
years ago. This year, we shipped four pallets. They have now moved into a
larger warehouse which I was invited to see earlier this year. They are
expanding again. Soon we will be up to 5 pallets and eventually more. Our
goal is expand Baseball and Softball throughout Uganda, and they are making
a major contribution to making that happen.
While we are restarting our Little League tournament this May, we expect to
be starting up our secondary school tournaments in early December or early
January. We will decide that schedule probably during the Little League
Tournaments. We do expect the secondary school program to expand in Africa.
The next thing after we expand the secondary school program is what happens
when the students graduate from the Secondary Schools. This is a problem the
Uganda Baseball and Softball Federation now needs to begin to seriously work
on. The Adult league has to come if they expect to eventually have Uganda
playing in the Baseball Classic and the 2028 Los Angles Olympics. We can
make it, but the Federation needs to accomplish a great deal. One thing that
would help is the Dodgers continue on developing the baseball players for
the Dodger organization and for the U.S. colleges. One female is graduating
from college this coming January, and two of our male students are now
students in a Houston, Texas University playing baseball. One a first year
student and one now in his second year.
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