07/30/2026
WE ARE NORTH SHORE LITTLE LEAGUE
Some Reflections From NSLL President Steve Capell As The Fall Season Approaches; Registration Link Below in Comments
With all due respect to Tom Hanks, there is crying in baseball. And there’s lots of it in Little League.
You see it after tough losses. You see it when kids learn that hard-hit balls and errant pitches can hurt. You see it in the Pee-Wee division when they learn for the first time that your at-bats don’t always have happy endings and that sometimes you get called out. You see it in T-ball when… well, you see it in T-ball for all sorts of reasons.
The point is this: there is, in fact, plenty of crying in baseball. As I look around after the season we just had, I can only ask: how could there not be? Every spring, dozens of brand-new teams form and, with seemingly impossible speed, those teams come together and the kids form bonds and friendships, some of which they’ll carry well into the future. Nevertheless, the teams as they were this season will never again be reconstituted exactly as they are. Every year, and every team, is always wholly unique, and saying goodbye to that team is always a bittersweet proposition.
More significantly, there is the fact that no kid ends a season as the exact same player they were at the start. They develop skills and more importantly, maturity. When I look back at my time coaching—which is now some 30-plus years in the rearview mirror—that was always my favorite aspect of the job: having a hand in and observing that development. At its best, that is what Little League provides, an intangible positive change in a kid’s life that has nothing to do with whether they won or lost a game. Rather, it has absolutely everything to do with the confidence these boys and girls take with them into the future—a future they are now better-prepared to approach having learned how to work as part of a team to achieve a common goal.
At North Shore Little League, our primary goal is to preserve the simplicity and beauty of Little League in this community, a proud tradition first established here in Rocky Point in 1963. Back then we had only the one field—the big one now known as Doubleday—and while we’ve grown and a lot has changed, our mission hasn’t.
As President of NSLL, I’m the official caretaker of that mission, but I don’t take on the responsibility alone. I oversee the league’s Board of Directors, which, contrary to popular belief, does much more than vote on things like rule changes and budgets. In fact, that’s very little of what they do. Their main charge is to keep the league affordable and accessible for as many families as possible. Each year, they accomplish this by volunteering to do thousands of hours of unglamorous, unpaid, and often invisible work.
Some of that work includes maintaining and lining the fields, emptying all the trash cans, ordering uniforms, training umpires, organizing our picture days, running the concession stand, balancing our accounts, designing and printing the banners you see around town, running our website, opening and closing the facility every day, and dozens of other jobs, not to mention the solving of unique problems that always crop up over the course of a season. I feel no obligation to list everything the board members do because they don’t do it for recognition, or for the free windbreaker we give them once a year. I’m sure you’d agree it’s much easier to just buy a windbreaker than to empty all the trash cans after a full slate of Saturday games.
No, they do this work because somewhere along the way all these men and women learned—possibly in Little League back in the day—that when we all work together, we can achieve something great. When I look around these fields each day—teeming with so much life, so much enthusiasm for the greatest game that ever blessed God’s green Earth—I can only come to the conclusion that they’ve done just that.
I’m immensely proud of their efforts, proud to welcome you here, and prouder still to continue the great tradition that is North Shore Little League.
Gosh, it almost brings a tear to my eye. But hey, that’s baseball. See you at the fields.
Sincerely,
Steve Capell
President NSLL
