West Hartford Baseball Team To Play In Cuba – Hartford Courant

WEST HARTFORD — With 700 pounds of school supplies, baseball equipment and musical instruments in tow, a local baseball team plans fly to Holguin, Cuba for a one-week goodwill tour.

“Baseball for them is the universal language,” said Tim Brennan, assistant coach and one of the program leaders. “It is just the vehicle or the medium to connect these kids.”

A group of 60, including parents, grandparents and siblings of 18 young baseball ambassadors from West Hartford, plan to travel by bus to Montreal and fly to Holguin on April 9, 2016, he said.

The idea for the trip started in March, when “Spaceman” Bill Lee, a former Major League Baseball pitcher, visited the town’s World Series Club, a non-profit baseball club for all ages, Brennan said. Lee told the group that he was an ambassador for Caribbean Baseball Goodwill Tours, a Canadian organization that connects baseball teams with their counterparts in Cuba, Brennan said.

“It was serendipity,” he said. “We had Bill at the Club talking about Cuba at the same time [the U.S] sanctions were loosening.”

Brennan said he decided to take players in bracket U-14, those 14 and under. There were no tryouts for the 18 positions — instead, Brennan said he tried to “identify good kids who we thought would be interested and could benefit by this cultural experience.”

The 18 players, who may or may not have been on a team together previously, will be teammates for a week and play against a Cuban team, he said. The team will also visit a Cuban school and eat and swim at their hotel with their Cuban counterparts, he said.

The Cuba trip will serve as the pilot program for Teen Cultures Connect, a non-profit organization Brennan said he helped form to allow teenagers to connect with their peers from around the world through shared interests.

The non-profit is raising money from families, friends and businesses for the equipment and supplies that will be donated to the Cuban people, he said.

Ideally, the non-profit’s next goal is to bring a group of Cuban teens and their coaches to West Hartford in the summer of 2016, Brennan said.

Maureen Kenna, whose son Brian is going on the trip, said it would be life changing and eye opening for the boys. Many of the boys’ Cuban counterparts don’t play baseball with bases, just paper bags, she said, and many may not even have shoes.

“All of the boys going have a love of baseball, and I think that is so universal,” she said. “For them to be able to meet up with boys from another country and culture and know there is something that bonds them, I think they will come home and realize just how easy it is for them to play baseball in the U.S.”

Team member Jack Brennan, 13, said he was looking forward to seeing the cultural differences in Cuba.

“I’m excited about seeing what it’s like; how Cuban kids live and how it’s different in the U.S. and Cuba,” Brennan said. “I want to meet friends and connect with the Cuban kids.”

Former Major League player Devon Whyte will kick off the program with a visit to the World Series Club at the West Hartford VFW, 83 South St., on Nov. 5. Whyte, an ambassador for the Canada-Cuba Goodwill tour, will speak on how he has used the lessons of his MLB career to foster goodwill with the Cuban people, Brennan said.