It all started with a batting cage, or rather, the lack of one.
Back in 2017, West Brownsville Little League coaches Rusty Brock and Mark Lucio decided batting cages would be a nice addition to the league’s home park on Cottonwood Drive next door to Brownsville Fire Station No. 4. They brought the idea to Dino Chavez, who’s been closely involved with the league for years and currently serves as president. He agreed it was a good idea.
“As a little league, when we compete against teams from San Antonio and Houston and Dallas etc., it’s kind of a shame that our kids don’t have the same facilities that some of these other kids do,” Chavez said. “I said let’s see what we can do about building one batting cage.”
There was a problem: The only place in the park where a batting cage could go was under water much of the time.
“That basketball court that was there always flooded, and flooded so much that sometimes there were ducks,” Chavez said. “It was funny. I took some videos of ducks there.”
Dealing with that meant getting the city involved, since it’s a city park. It formerly belonged to the First United Methodist Church, which in 1962 offered to partner up with the league and make the land available as home field. The church operated the concessions and the league, which was founded 10 years earlier, ran everything else.
“That was the partnership,” Chavez said. “That went well from the 1960s until the 1990s, so for about 30 years or so it ran that way.”
At some point around the mid- to late 1990s, First Methodist decided to get out of the little league concessions business and donated the park to the city — on the condition that WBLL remain a permanent tenant, he said. The city did some modest renovations at the time including new lights and fencing, and built a new concession stand to replace the old one that was falling down, but not much else happened at the park in terms of improvements for about two decades, Chavez said.
“I’d been asking the city forever to do things and I just always got an excuse,” he said.
To fix the flooding problem, Chavez took matters into his own hands and approached Rep. Eddie Lucio III, who’s related to league coach and board member Mark Lucio, and who put Chavez in touch with Rene Capistran, president and CEO of Noble Texas Builders. Capistran said he could do some leveling and install culverts to at least get the water into the street, and that he could build the batting cage too, as long as the league paid for the cage and concrete — about $15,000.
“Our immediate goal was let’s raise some money for the batting cage,” Chavez said. “We had a league fundraiser and I think we raised maybe about $10,000 or $11,000. That was back in 2017 or 2018.”
The league went to the Brownsville Beautification Committee for tree and shrub money at the suggestion of city parks and recreation Director Damaris McGlone. While the league waited for word from the BBC on that, Chavez began thinking about what else could be done. He talked to then-city commissioner Joel Munguia, who recommended that the league apply for a grant from the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation.
What Chavez really wanted was a T-ball field, since the park was at capacity and the T-ballers were having to use the two regular fields, which drastically cut into the game schedule for the older league divisions. He measured the T-ball field at Oliveira Park and realized there was plenty of room for one in the park’s northwest corner. Munguia suggested making it accessible to special needs kids as well, said Chavez, who asked special-needs expert Sergio Zarate to join the league board to guide the effort.
“I said we have the manpower, we just don’t have the expertise,” Chavez said.
The Little League Challenger Division for special-needs competitors was founded in 1989, and now WBLL hosts the only division in Cameron, Hidalgo or Willacy County, he said.
The usual dirt and grass wouldn’t work because wheelchairs would get bogged down, so the league looked into the cost of going with artificially turf, not just the T-ball field but park’s two bigger diamonds as well.
“We determined that it was going to take a substantial amount of money,” Chavez said. “We had more barbecue fundraisers. We raised probably another $10,000 to $15,000. All in all we raised about $25,000 in league fundraisers. It became a much bigger plan then.”
Rather than Capistran doing culverts, the city installed a drain to solve the flooding and Noble Builders donated $100,000 worth of special-needs restroom, with some of the company’s vendors donating equipment and manpower. The Hernandez Foundation, thanks to Eddie Lucio, weighed in with a check for $58,000, while many other private donors contributed to the project, some anonymously, Chavez said.
The league approached the city with all the money it had raised and requested a $200,000 match, which the commission voted to approve. BCIC wound up kicking in $300,000. All told, what started as an effort to scrape together a few thousand bucks for a batting cage morphed into $1.1 million in improvements to the park. Installing turf on the fields alone cost $600,000, Chavez said, noting that there are still a few items on the to-do list.
Among them is a pavilion for post-game get-togethers and such, though the $40,000 set aside for it in the original plan had to be diverted to turf to cover an unexpected shortfall, he said.
“It’s still in our vision to do that but we just don’t have the money for it right now,” Chavez said.
With luck that means more barbecue fundraisers on the horizon. The league also has additional playground equipment waiting in a city warehouse to be installed and plans to put a metal roof over the T-ball field.
“Right now it’s just way too hot,” Chavez said. “We planted some oak trees back there but it could be 10 years before they give any amount of shade.”
Thanks to the improvements, league registration shot up in 2020 from the usual 325 to 350 kids who sign up each year, he said.
“We registered almost 700 kids,” Chavez said. “That’s double. That also included about 100 special-needs kids.”
Last year would have been the first season on the new turf. Registration and tryouts were out of the way and then came the pandemic, which shut everything down. Registrations have rebounded to nearly the same level for 2021, even though many people are still apprehensive about COVID-19, Chavez said.
“It’s going to be scary to see what our numbers are going to be next year when there’s no COVID,” he said.
Chavez estimates he put in about 1,000 hours of his own time into making the park improvements a reality but said it was very much a group effort. Mark Lucio, for example, was a “key person” every step of the way, he said.
“The whole plan came together and approximately $1.1 million later, through a joint venture of the city, BCIC, WBLL, the parks department, several private vendors like Noble Texas Builders and other donors, we now have what you see, which is a beautiful place compared to what it was like before,” Chavez said.
For more information, visit www.westbrownsvillelittleleague.com
