LYNN — While many youth baseball programs around the country are in decline, Greater Lynn Babe Ruth is on the rise after the 15s’ World Series run a summer ago.
“The League as a whole kind of grew in numbers,” President Rich Avery said. “While the rest are declining, we actually grew this year… And obviously with the World Series team last year, there was a ton of excitement coming into this season.”
Well, it’s time to run it back. It’s Avery’s first year as president, who enters in relief for Jeff Earp.
“I was his right-hand man. He’s getting older now,” Avery said. “I learned a lot from him in the last four or five years until I took over this year.”
Avery comes with confidence, too. With last summer being a historic one with a trip to Virginia, he believes this year’s team comes with a similar package.
“These kids saw the success that the 15s had last year,” Avery said. “I’d say, arguably, this team is better-talented than last year’s team, but we’ll see how far they go.”
“We have a bunch of kids from the St. Mary’s team,” he said. “They got that game experience on the run that St. Mary’s went on this year, so that’s only going to help us moving forward. We’ve got some other kids that have been in the program for years.”
Avery is also an assistant coach with the 15s alongside head coach Leon Elwell – who’s now coached three World Series teams. The team began practicing two weeks ago after its regular season playoffs.
“We went heavy practice to start, getting ready to learn our system, our signs, and stuff like that,” Avery said. “As we got towards our first game, we kind of dialed it back a little bit and just kind of rested their bodies a little bit… [It’s about] the thinking part of the game more than anything.”
Those practices must have been good ones. Greater Lynn opened its season with an 11-0 win against Swampscott Monday night – not to mention, allowing zero hits in the process.
“Jake Peterson started for us. He’s our ace,” Avery said. “He went three innings and only threw 32 pitches, and he had seven strikeouts.”
Avery added that Swampcsott is very talented, but also, very young.
“They made some mistakes early on and we took advantage of that. It was one of those games where we wanted to win it early, and we came out of there without any injuries or anything like that.”
Moving forward, the 15s face Marblehead at Fraser Field Wednesday (5:30). The 14s play right after against Peabody (8), while the 13s next play ball Thursday against Peabody at Fraser (7:30).
All three teams play with a mindset all their coaches preach: togetherness.
“Leon always has a saying: ‘We have Lynn on the front of our shirts, but we don’t have any names on the back of our shirts because we play for Lynn. We don’t play for ourselves,’” Avery said. “We preach respect to the game, we preach playing the game the right way, and come and work hard.”
Something else the program offers is improvement, as talented Lynn players such as Ben Bowden, Kevin Whalen, and Brady Warren have been around the block.
“Our goal is to make all the Lynn Babe Ruth kids better for high school and beyond,” Avery said. “They (former presidents Earp and Jim Beliveau) built this program to compete at the next level.”
