The Road to Little League’s Biggest Day

MISSION VIEJO — You buy a home in the gated community of Canyon Crest and you get a ball field close by. And with a ball field just a long home run away, what do you do? You play ball.

Or at least your kids do. Like the seven lucky boys from this California dream of a place whose team just became U.S. Little League Champions.

If the South Mission Viejo All-Stars have a hometown, it is in the 600 homes of a gated subdivision called Canyon Crest, where the kids hang out together, the moms play tennis together, and fans these days are painting banners and making noisemakers, gearing up to cheer for their team during today’s World Championship game.

Yes, acknowledge the families in the big houses woven among the hills of this community, they do spend an awful lot of time in their air-conditioned cars and their air-conditioned rec rooms and their air-conditioned malls.

But, they say between breathless phone conversations with friends about today’s game, the spirit pouring forth from these cul-de-sacs gives lie to those who say suburbanites live isolated lives.

“That’s the thing about Canyon Crest--it overlooks those [ball] fields. You move here, you have kids, and boom,” said Bill Gaggioli, whose son played for years in the same league as this year’s champions.

“It’s a lot more than a bunch of houses. It’s a neighborhood. And sports, baseball, this team, is symbolic of that. So we’re all just hooking in to the excitement. We’re all sharing the reward.”

Canyon Crest is not, of course, the only place in Mission Viejo that can lay claim to one or more of this year’s adolescent baseball heroes. Almost half the team lives somewhere else. And with more than 20,000 kids in this city of about 70,000, you can bet there are a lot of proud parents elsewhere.

But this is the place right next door to the fields where the league plays all year. Dozens of other kids among the hundreds in the league the all-star team draws from live in Canyon Crest. Many of them attend Castille Elementary School nearby.

This subdivision is the sort of place where people really believe the maxim that sports is life. The neighborhood, after all, lies right off a street called Olympiad, so named, moms here are quick to point out, for the bicycle races that whipped up and down the roadway during the 1984 Summer Olympics.

People move here because the Little League is so good, the soccer teams are so good, the gymnastics teams and swim teams and diving teams are so good. Greg Louganis grew up not far away. Dads and moms display their trophies from college sports triumphs. Fathers change out of their suits and ties and into jeans in their cars to coach their kids. Moms work the snack bars at games.

Keep the kids busy and tired and healthy, families here say, and they’ll turn out well.

“It’s a collection of memories. I feel that way about baseball,” said Jacky Young, who was busy Friday planning a sign-making party in advance of next Wednesday night’s homecoming celebration for the Little League team.

“My husband, my boys, when they get together they talk about baseball. It’s something that connects across generations. Sports is a very big part of our lives. When you live here, it’s the mother, the father, the kids, the whole deal, everyone involved.”

Diane and Larry Holt and their three kids came here from the East Coast nine years ago, exhausted after 13 moves. The airy house with the three-car garage they live in now hadn’t yet been built back then. They hired someone to stand in line to get it and chose it from a brochure.

But from the first day they came out house-hunting with their kids, Wendy, Amy and Andy, they found what the family was looking for.

“We got here on the eighth day of rain in New Jersey and it was a glorious day, with people out on the lake rowing in boats,” Diane Holt said.

“Right away we found a gymnastics center for Wendy. We found a swim team for Amy, a preschool and future sports fields for Andy. We didn’t need to see the house. We were home.”

For weeks now in Canyon Crest parents of kids on the all-star team have hung banners from their garages and out their windows, in defiance of homeowner association rules, cheering their players on.

Neighbors who don’t have kids, or whose kids don’t play baseball, have gotten into the spirit too, watching the games on cable at home, and showing up at the local sports bar that has become a league hangout.

It’s all to be expected in a place where people play golf together, run together, swim together, go to the symphony and the theater together and share season tickets to the Anaheim Angels and the Mighty Ducks, residents say.

This year, league parents raised more than $26,000 running a volunteer snack bar at the games. The league takes the getting involved ethos so seriously that parents with kids in the league who don’t volunteer at the snack bar have to contribute $25 a season.

“You just do it,” Gaggioli said. “This is Mission Viejo.”

On Friday, Diane Holt was busy adding to a scrapbook she has created about the South Mission Viejo All-Stars. Her 13-year-old son, Andy, was at a friend’s house, pushing coins into plastic water bottles labeled “South MV” used as noisemakers.

No matter that Andy isn’t on the team. He’s 13 now, playing on a team of older boys. He’s as obsessed with today’s game as everyone else.

“It’s kind of grabbing the comet’s tail. It’s like, ‘Take me along with you,’ you get so caught up in it,” said Holt’s friend and tennis partner, Vicki McDowell, whose son, Steven, also grew up playing in the South Mission Viejo league. At her home a few blocks away, there is a football in the kitchen and a baseball mitt in the dining room.

“You get to where you can’t think of anything else, you’re so charged up about it,” McDowell said.