Chandler Baseball Camp

Attention campers: Fox 25 will be doing a story on the camp tonight at 9pm.

http://newsok.com/fields-of-dreams-two-men-workin//4986057

Building big league citizens

Construction at CBC cafeteria

I’ve said often enough to anyone that’ll listen that I don’t know the first thing about running a baseball camp, but two things I’ve learned that have been very useful to me in life are to ask a lot of questions and to never be afraid to bring in someone that knows more than I do. I’m in Europe this week working and took some time to meet up with someone that knows a lot more than I do about baseball and the baseball camp. Didi Dahmann is the Assistant Coach of the Solingen ...Alligators, the 1st Division, Baseball Bundesliga team from Solingen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Didi is a 30-year veteran of German baseball and has been instrumental in growing the game in his country. He’s taught the game to kids, coached adults, has been with the Alligators organization as they’ve gone from playing on borrowed public fields to a ballpark of their own. In 2006 they won Germany’s League title. So Didi knows baseball. His experience has put him in the middle of three areas that are of particular interest to me and what we’re trying to do with the baseball camp: building community support, coaching kids, and the business side of baseball. What made me especially eager to meet him is that he spent his summers at the Chandler Baseball Camp. Didi went to camp each summer starting in the early 1980s and kept coming back: first as a player, later as a counselor, and eventually as a coach. Over dinner in Cologne the other night we talked about his time at the camp, we talked about his memories of Chandler, and Didi talked about how influential the camp experience had been for him, molding him as a player and a person. Didi remembered the sounds of an Oklahoma summer night, the noise from the cabin fans, watching baseball films projected on a sheet, getting an injury fixed by Dr. Mileham, and Andrew Vassar working in the laundry room, but what he recalled most clearly was how much he learned from Tom Belcher. Tom taught me a lot about baseball, about coaching, and about how you treat people. I was just a kid and I was a long way from home. Tom, and the camp, and the people in Chandler, they made me feel welcome. That’s not something you forget. From Tom I learned that you build a team by making the weakest player feel like they belong. It was good to meet Didi, he’s a remarkable young man. I think Tom Belcher would be very proud of him. That’s all for now. Mike.