Boys from Benin compete in Robbinsdale baseball tournament – Washington Times

ROBBINSDALE, Minn. (AP) – A few years ago, most of them had never heard of baseball. Now, a dozen boys from Africa are in the Twin Cities getting ready to play in their first tournament.

“They’re pioneers,” Wally Langfellow, one of the organizers of the boys’ trip, told KARE-TV (http://kare11.tv/2b5wEeA ). “They are baseball pioneers.”

The boys from the West African nation of Benin are play in a wood bat tournament that began Thursday and will continue through Sunday in Robbinsdale, the same annual tournament that’s helped raise the money to pay for their trip.

Baseball was nonexistent in Benin until Gary Tonsager, a Twin Cities optician, traveled to Benin on a mission trip delivering eyeglasses to people who couldn’t afford them.

While on the trip, Tonsager began talking baseball to one of his interpreters, Fernando Atannon.

“When the idea of baseball came, I was like this something I can discover, a new thing that I can learn,” said Atannon, who made the trip to the Twin Cities with the boys.

Atannon began studying baseball clips on YouTube and then passing along what he’d learned to some of the boys in his neighborhood. Meantime, Robbinsdale High School classmates Tonsager and Langfellow began gathering up used baseball gear to send to Atannon.

Six years later, 120 boys are playing baseball in Benin on dirt fields that are as much obstacle courses as baseball diamonds.

“There’s puddles, there’s ruts, there’s soccer balls hitting them in the head,” said Langfellow, who traveled to Benin with Tonsager earlier this year.

The friends already have drawings of the baseball field they hope to build for the boys in Benin, as Atannon continues to grow the country’s baseball program.