Nov. 16, 2006

Washington, D.C. - The thing he remembers most are the smiles.

It's a lasting image. A smile can cure any ill. If you've had a bad day or if you're tired from a long trip, a simple smile can change your heart.

Georgetown University Head Baseball Coach Pete Wilk is expecting to have that feeling again this weekend.

For the sixth-straight year, Wilk, along with about a dozen other baseball coaches from the Washington, D.C. area, will board a plane bound for the Dominican Republic. Once there, the group will make its way to the town of Consuelo, near San Pedro de Macoris, where they are welcomed like presents underneath a tree on Christmas morning.

The clinics, if you can call it that, are part of a program created by Wilk's friend, John McCarthy, who he has known from working baseball camps in the Georgetown area.

McCarthy, a former college baseball player, first approached coaches about the opportunity to teach in the Dominican six years ago. The idea, however, wasn't just to teach kids about America's Pastime, it was about showing kids that there could be more to life than just baseball.

Through McCarthy's work and the help he's gotten from coaches in the area - Wilk is the lone college coach - the program, called Beisbol Y Libros (Baseball and Books), has become a central part of life for kids in Consuelo, something they look forward to every year.

"I remember when he first told me about it," Wilk said, "and I thought it sounded like a fantastic opportunity. I never knew it would become something that we do every year."

That is what it has become.

In its first year of existence, McCarthy, Wilk and the other coaches helped to teach around 100 kids about baseball.

Last December when the group went, they had nearly 400 kids.

Over the course of five years, McCarthy and his staff have seen the program grow.

Currently, there are 20 paid coaches in the Dominican associated with the program. They live in the town of Consuelo and the Peace Corps sends two full-time staff people to assist with daily needs.

"It's been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life," Wilk said. "To be included in that group of coaches and to teach the game to the Dominican youth and their coaches has been incredible."

Baseball is not the only course taught at the camp. The coaches who live there during the year are teachers. They help to teach classes - ranging from math to English - so that the kids have other avenues to explore.

"That's one of the things that really attracted me," Wilk said. "So many times, you hear about these kids from the Dominican who come to the States and they don't have any other options.

"What we're trying to teach them is that they have other opportunities."

Opportunities can be few and far between for these kids and, Wilk says, Beisbol y Libros has given them an avenue.

"The first year we were down there, word got around," he said, "and we saw kids coming straight out of the sugar cane fields, barefoot in some cases, jumping over the fence to join in. We went from a group of about 100 kids to about 200 in an hour. These kids just jumped in. They would even start tossing battle caps to one kid with a stick and that's how they'd learn to hit."

The Dominican youth have also seen aspects of the American culture and embraced it.

"I still remember the second trip, we went down a year or so after the first trip," Wilk explained. "They had the kids learn the National Anthem and they played it with their band and sang it with their choir. That was an unbelievable feeling."

And while the coaches have gone to the Dominican with the thought of teaching about baseball and life, they have also been received with open arms from the people in the area.

"The second year, they threw this parade for us as we entered the town and they surrounded the bus and were chanting our names as they saw us peering out of the bus," Wilk said. "I felt a bit like Mick Jagger, without the lips, of course. But to get out of the bus and see what they had built with funds we raised in the United States was inspiring.

"They had built their own field and were obviously quite proud of it, as they should be."

The program had its genesis through McCarthy, who first went to the Dominican to be a guest coach at the Los Angeles Dodgers Academy. He was curious about the culture and while there, he met Sister Lenore Gibb, a Canadian nun who had been living in the Dominican for 40 years, the superintendent of the Consuelo public school system.

Sister Lenore introduced McCarthy to Pepe Frias, a former Major Leaguer born and raised in Consuelo. Together, they formed Beisbol y Libros.

"I wanted to do more, I wanted to get to know the real life for these kids," McCarthy said. "I asked the Peace Corps, most of them who were school teachers, if I could show them how to coach and I went down and trained the volunteers in baseball."

That's where friends like Wilk entered the picture. In the five years since its inception, Wilk has been one of McCarthy's key coaches in the program. He has gone to the Dominican for each of the previous five years. When the program needed equipment, he reached out to every school in the BIG EAST Conference and other schools and was able to solicit donations from his coaching brethren to send to the Dominican.

"My colleagues have been wonderful in past years, sending old gear, whether it's uniforms, bats, catcher's gear, gloves, all this stuff," he explained. "Twice in the six years we've brought a bunch of used equipment down that have been sent from the nation's college and universities. This weekend, I'll probably see guys running around in William & Mary uniforms that are two sizes too big for them."

"Pete is a teacher of teachers," McCarthy said. "We're taking a kids' love of baseball and teaching and linking it to academic progress and effort."

And while the work done in Consuelo may seem like grass-roots type work, Wilk says that it's not much different from what any college coach does on a day-to-day basis.

"In a lot of ways, what we've done through Mac (McCarthy) is similar to what I do at Georgetown," Wilk said. "I'm a small part of Beisbol y Libros, but we want to make sure these kids are matriculating through school with a love of sports. It's just that this program does it at the elementary and middle school level and not the college level."

At the root of the program, however, is the game. Kids growing up in the Dominican have a love for the game that is almost unparalleled in the States, something that Wilk has witnessed firsthand.

"Mac (McCarthy) and I were walking back to our hotel this past November after lunch," Wilk related. "We were walking through an extremely poor neighborhood and up on our right, we saw this kid, he must have been eight years old, and he was doing curls with this primitive weight set he had apparently made from cement, coffee cans and a stick.

"He had poured cement into the coffee cans and set the stick in as the cement hardened. Here he was, living in these harsh conditions, trying to get strong like a Major Leaguer."

Being a Major Leaguer, however, is something that Beisbol y Libros tries to show the kids is not the only opportunity.

"This whole thing is not about the prospects who are going to go down the street to one of the (baseball) academies," Wilk said. "It's about the little kids and showing them that there is an opportunity, whether it's athletics or books."

The end result for the kids may not ever be known by Wilk and his colleagues, but for a brief time, they know they are making an impact.

"I can't wait," Wilk said. "I can't wait to see the kids again. The excitement in their eyes fires you up, no matter how tired you are. They've been waiting all year to do this. You get to live Santa Claus. I can't describe it and words do not do it justice."

By Mike "Mex" Carey,
Sports Information Director, Georgetown University