When economics professor William Trumbull suggested to his students to bring a few baseballs and baseball cards with them on a study abroad trip to Cuba as part of an economics class, Justin Halladay didn’t balk.
Any opportunity to pick up a ball again was one he’d never take for granted. Baseball was his life for 18 years, up until the summer after his senior year of high school, when he was forced to retire due to rotator cuff trouble.
Little did he know those baseballs he took with him on the trip during his junior year at West Virginia University in 1999 would change his life and eventually inspire him to create an organization focused on not only improving but also saving the baseball culture for children in Latin American countries.
“It was really eye-opening for me,” Halladay said. “That’s where I first saw baseball for the potential to help out.”
Halladay and his classmates, including friend Peter Freedman, brought baseball cards and baseballs to give out to Cuban children, as well as their own gloves to play catch during downtime.
“These people are baseball crazy. They really are. Baseball equipment just isn’t a priority, so there’s a shortage,” said Trumbull, a nearly 30-year veteran of the WVU College of Business and Economics. “It really provides an opportunity to interact with locals, and that’s hard in Cuba.”
They gave away the cards and in return had a chance to see some parts of Cuba’s capital city that may have been too dangerous for Americans to visit without locals going along. After playing catch with the children on the beach on their last day, the group decided to give away all of their own gear – the bats and gloves some had been using for years.
“It was like Christmas for them. It was incredible the reaction we received,” Freedman said. “I remember Justin saying after, ‘We should do this.’ I was like, ‘Do what?’ He looked at me and said, ‘This. Look how much we’re changing things.’”
Halladay stood there on the beach with dozens of Cuban children and gave away his glove. He donated to the less fortunate and gained something he might’ve never received had he not been so generous – an idea he would use nearly 10 years later.
“It was such a shame. Nobody had even a baseball to play with. We threw with those kids for a while that day,” Halladay recalled. “That planted the seed in my mind.”
He started to think of potential solutions to problems – the inequality, the racism and the lack of opportunities for the people in these countries – on that trip.
Halladay, a native of the Philadelphia area, would take three study abroad trips in his WVU career before graduating in 2000. He switched his major from pre-business to international studies because of those experiences he had overseas. He said he fell in love with the language, the culture and the beauty he encountered on his trips.
“Getting to come to West Virginia, I got to see different parts of the country and different people from different parts of the States. Ultimately, I was looking for new experiences. I wanted to learn more, and I thought a great way to see and experience the world was to do it through my own eyes,” he said.
When he graduated from WVU, Halladay sold his car and moved to Brazil, where he spent time voluntarily teaching English as a second language to businesses for a fee and voluntarily to community leaders in the favelas, Brazilian shantytowns.
Following more trips to Russia, Northern Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America and what he called “odd jobs” like working in a flea market, he returned to the States to study again and settled down with a position at the Florida campus of the Cleveland Clinic.
In 2004-06, when he was studying to receive an MBA from Florida Atlantic University, Halladay more specifically planned out what he wanted to create.
That’s when Halladay’s idea, which was planted in his mind back when he was at WVU, came to life. In 2008, he formed Project Beisbol with the goal of collecting baseball equipment from Americans and giving it to children in Latin American countries.
“I never felt like throwing money at something was a good way to fix a problem. I never saw that as a solution,” Halladay said. “I felt like you could either help people learn or give them the tools to do so.”
Instead of giving equipment to children in countries like Brazil, where baseball isn’t as popular, Halladay found through research that countries like Nicaragua and the Caribbean Coast of Colombia would benefit the most.
“We don’t take the equipment to places that don’t know about baseball. I realized you start with the countries that love the sport,” he said. “We work with the community leaders and support them with supplies to be able to train the kids.”
Halladay returned to those who were closest to him when he originally was inspired. He called college buddies Freedman, a friend who lived on his floor freshman year, and Eric Goodbody, his roommate on his study abroad trip to Spain.
“The thing that’s incredible about it is it started out as an idea on a school trip to Cuba. I didn’t understand the ramifications of giving a baseball or a mitt away at the time,” said Freedman, a WVU student who majored in liberal arts and sciences from 1997 to 2000.
Goodbody and Freedman weren’t surprised when Halladay was ready to execute the idea of Project Beisbol.
“They told me I’ve been talking about this stuff for years – probably ever since Cuba,” he said. “I had very influential travel experiences with both, so they knew me and heard me talk about these ideas. When I said I was serious about it, they knew I was. They were excited and got involved too, and they were very helpful in many areas.”
In 2009, Freedman was part of the first significant equipment delivery for Project Beisbol. He drove from his home in Virginia to fill his Jeep with baseball equipment in Philadelphia. From there, he drove it to North Carolina where Halladay met him to take it the remainder of the way to Florida.
Along the way, Halladay had the help from high school and college interns in Florida and a friend Julio Cuarezma, who Halladay referred to as the Cal Ripken of professional baseball in Nicaragua. With his assistance, Project Beisbol made its first significant delivery to Nicaragua in 2009. Among the communities benefited were Los Papuchos of Managua, Jinotega, San Isidro, La Barranca, Rivas and San Juan del Sure, where children received bats, gloves, baseballs and all the other necessary equipment to play the game they love.
Now, Project Beisbol supplies more than 15 communities and foundations in Nicaragua. In 2012, it also started to supply communities in Colombia with equipment.
“Colombia is a soccer country, but there is a strong baseball culture on the northern Caribbean coast. It’s interesting to see these concentrated pockets of baseball in a predominantly soccer culture,” Halladay said. “In this town we went to, Arroyo Grande, baseball had kind of faded away. The field was bad. We realized if they didn’t have the equipment, they didn’t have the option to buy it even if they had a little bit of money. Sports just die. It gets ugly and depressing.”
So far, Project Beisbol has made seven trips to Nicaragua and Colombia, delivering more than 7,000 pounds of baseball and softball equipment, benefiting more than 1,100 children in 24 communities.
The nonprofit has started to bridge baseball and softball communities in the U.S. and abroad, as well, through the Global Youth Connect Program.
Goodbody, a 1999 WVU graduate in foreign languages, developed the idea to connect his 8-year-old son’s Woodbridge (Va.) Little League team to a team in Arroyo Grande, Colombia. Woodbridge provided uniforms and equipment specifically for the children in Colombia. The hope is that in the future these relationships would allow for the two teams to meet and play a game at some point.
“We took all this stuff – four duffle bags full of equipment – enough for three teams – and we drove in during the evening one night. The people in town were ecstatic, jumping around, screaming and smiling. It was so rewarding for all of us,” Halladay said. “Since our trip, the league is thriving. It’s pretty neat. This year, the two teams communicate like pen pals.”
Project Beisbol is expanding, too. From consisting of just Halladay and a few interns at the start, the organization has extended its reach. Now, there are people across the country in California working to donate for the cause. Teams and even some corporations have expressed interest in sponsoring even more teams, as well.
“I can only imagine the feeling of getting another kid’s baseball glove and wondering who it used to belong to. A glove is a cherished and sentimentally valued piece of leather. It’s probably got a story to tell. It’s been retired from one field and now moving on to another thousands of miles away,” Goodbody said. “It’s important that the kids we are helping know that there are people in an entirely different country looking out for them.”
No Project Beisbol member has made a dime. Every cent is spent to cover the operational costs of gathering, storing and delivering the equipment to Latin America.
“This is as simple as one American kid donating a glove that he outgrew. That glove ended up in another kid’s hand in Nicaragua. That kid could never afford a mitt. They’d play without mitts or bats. That glove helped form a team that got the kid out of his hometown, into the capital city to play and then to the U.S. to experience a whole different way of life,” Freedman said. “It started with a kid outgrowing his mitt … It’s incredible something that started off as a small idea has really affected so many.”
To find out ways to give to Project Beisbol, visit http://projectbeisbol.org/ or http://facebook.com/projectbeisbol/.
“You don’t have outcomes like that while teaching your ECON 201 class. It’s nice to know that what you’re doing has impact,” Trumbull said. “If he was motivated to do what he has done as a direct consequence to the experience he had in Cuba … Wow, that’s incredibly gratifying. Those are the reasons that motivate me to teach this class – stories like that.”
