It was quite a season for Franklin’s 8U baseball All-Stars.
After winning the N.C. District 5 Tournament last month, the team recently traveled to Wilson for the 8U Little League State Tournament. In winning two of three games at state, Franklin returned home as one of the best Little League teams in North Carolina.
“Our first practice was the first of June,” said head coach Michael Carpenter of forming the All-Star team. “I knew most of the kids from playing league, and we got to practice for two weeks before we had our first tournament game,”
Made up of the best 12 players from the area’s several Little League teams, the 8U All-Stars met after the spring regular season to represent Franklin in the District 5 Tournament. But while the seven and eight-year-olds had plenty of talent, the team wasn’t a finished product right away.
“By the second practice I knew all these kids were good, but you take kids that are used to playing in league where they’re the standout and other kids they’re playing with aren’t up to their capabilities, they don’t trust them and will try to make the play themselves or try to do too much. I knew if we could get them to understand that, ‘All 12 kids on this team guys, you’re all here for a reason. You didn’t just happen here, you were chosen for a reason. You’re all good; trust your teammates.’”
Because many Franklin All-Stars are the best players on their spring season teams, getting them to work as a unit can be difficult with just a few weeks of practice. After two pre-tournament scrimmages with Sylva however, coaches knew the team could be special.
“We run-ruled them in the fourth inning the first game, but you could tell by the way Sylva was playing they were a better team than that,” said Carpenter. “We had a 30-minute break and played again, and they jumped up on us by 10 runs right off the bat. The kids got excited and weren’t playing good, and we called time at the half-inning and pulled everybody in to talk to them. They all calmed down, and we fought back.”
Despite facing a massive deficit, Franklin came to life after the first inning, battling back to eventually threaten Sylva’s lead. With the game hanging on a razor’s edge, a controversy with the game clock added even more drama.
“There were a lot of fireworks in that game,” said Carpenter. “My son hit what should have been the walk-off run for his team to win the game, and the head umpire called the game. Their coach pitched a fit and went to complain about the time, [saying] his time was different than what the clock said. They started the game back and we ended up losing that game by one run, which was a scrimmage so it didn’t count against our record. But with the kids handling that adversity, I knew that we could talk them down in pretty much any situation and they would keep fighting and stay in the ballgame. You go down by 10 runs in a baseball game and come back and actually win the game, that’s pretty huge.”
Despite the controversial finish, Franklin’s furious comeback gave Carpenter’s staff faith that they would never be out of a game. In the District Tournament, the coaches’ faith was borne out.
“We never had to play a full game; we run-ruled every team,” said Carpenter. “Our last game was against Transylvania County, and as coaches we knew, because of some other teams that had lost games they shouldn’t have, that regardless of that game we were going to state and probably already had the tournament won. But, we still wanted to win every game, and that was the only game out of all four that we found ourselves down. We weren’t playing particularly well and found ourselves down by four runs, but were able to bring the kids in, talk to them about what they wanted and what our goals were when we started this thing. The next inning they settled down and started hitting the ball, and we ended that game in the fifth inning.”
After running roughshod over their tournament opponents to claim the District 5 title, the 8U All-Stars traveled to Wilson for the Little League State Tournament. There, they faced two opposite extremes of weather in their first two games.
“The first game, we were supposed to play Friday night at 6 o’clock; lightning happened, rain happened … and we were able to get them under a shelter there and talked to them,” said Carpenter. “They were loose that game; we played Forest City, and we were up 10-0 in the fourth and ended up beating them by 14 runs. … I think the game we played that Saturday morning was in the mid-90s at 9 o’clock when we started. That place is a little hotter than here anyway, but [that was] extreme heat and humidity, even for that part of the state. That was hard on them and they didn’t adapt to it very well, and playing at 9 o’clock in the morning was something we had never done.”
Battling the type of heat rarely experienced in the mountains, Franklin fell 13-8 to Bull City. In their final pool play game, they locked horns with Person County on Wilson’s main Little League field.
“[For] the last game we played, they’ve got a stadium. It’s just like a Major League stadium, but it’s sized down for Little League,” said Carpenter. “They’ve got a big screen and when they came up to bat they’d put their picture on the big screen, they had an announcer announcing them, so it was really, really cool for the kids. They loved it, and it was a super-great experience for them. They had a grass infield, and our infielders had never played on a grass infield.”
In a game that had the look and feel of a Major League contest, Franklin needed one more victory to advance to the tournament’s single-elimination bracket. The atmosphere was so intense in fact, that players couldn’t help but lose focus.
“We were down by five and ended up coming back in the ninth and took it into extra innings,” said Carpenter. “It was super-loud in the stadium, they had aluminum bleachers behind it and everything was covered. The fans started – which I didn’t really appreciate, they’re eight-year-old kids – and you’re behind them yelling ‘Strikeout’ and stomping your feet. And that’s what happened; they didn’t understand the noise, what was going on behind them. They were confused on what was going on and less focused on the ball coming to them.”
Having erased a five-run deficit to force extra inning, Franklin ultimately fell just shy, 7-6. Carpenter says his staff plans to create distractions in next year’s practices to acclimate the team to excessive noise from opposing fans. By contrast, he said his 8U All-Stars earned the right to represent Franklin.
“I was very impressed with the maturity level of the kids,” said Carpenter. “Playing in league, you’re the Franklin Blacks or the Franklin Grays during fall ball, and in spring ball you pick a Major League team and that’s who you are. All of them wanted to be a Panther, and I told them at our first practice and told our parents too, I pointed at my hat and said, ‘As long as you have this on, it means something around here.’ Years and years ago it didn’t, and it took a lot of work from a lot of coaches, a lot of kids and the community to make that ‘F’ mean something. I told them to wear it proudly, represent it. We’re gonna win with class and if we lose, we’re also gonna lose with class, and they did.”