East Hampton’s Little League organization is to benefit from a few free clinics that are coming up — the next one on Feb. 8 at the Springs School by the Bulldog Ball Club, which runs weeklong multisport camps in July and August based at East Hampton High School.
According to James Wong, director of Bulldog’s travel baseball teams, Bulldog used to charge for its 5-through-12-year-old clinics for boys and girls here, though the proceeds were donated, he said, to East Hampton Little League, whose website has a link to this week’s clinic and to one that is also to take place at the Springs School on March 14.
The Bulldog Ball Club, based in New York City, is looking forward to its seventh summer here, Wong said. Casey Brooks, the Groundworks women’s slow-pitch softball team’s left fielder — and, like Wong, a graduate of Post University in Waterbury, Conn. — will be in her fifth year as the summer camp director. Wong helps Andy Silich coach the Groundworks team.
The multisport (baseball, softball, basketball, soccer, flag football, and European team handball) camp “focuses,” Brooks said during a recent baseball and softball clinic at Springs, “on what it means to be an athlete, how to move in the most efficient way, eye-hand movement, body control and coordination . . . we’re always doing that, but what separates us is our philosophy, the mental side: We want to develop positivity, progress over results.”
It was the difference, she and Wong agreed, between saying, “I got two hits and we won,” and “I hit the ball harder than I ever have before, and I was a good teammate.”
“Between abstract thought and concrete thought,” Wong added. “Two different mind-sets . . . one, which we prefer, focusing on effort, the other on outcome.”
Coaches Clinic Feb. 22
East Hampton’s Little Leaguers are also to be availed of a free clinic put on by East Hampton High School’s baseball and softball coaches, Vinny Alversa and Annemarie Cangiolosi Brown, on Saturday, Feb. 22. On March 7, another Saturday, Alversa, along with his varsity assistant, Henry Meyer, and the junior varsity coaches, Andrew Rodriguez and Rob Rivera, as well as Will Collins of the Montauk School, are to evaluate all of the organization’s young ballplayers.