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Penn State Public Broadcasting Presents Small Ball: Little League Stories on Pbs in April

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Penn State Public Broadcasting Presents Small Ball: Little League Stories on Pbs in April Contact: Carol Wonsavage 814.865.3333 ext. 264 PENN STATE PUBLIC BROADCASTING PRESENTS SMALL BALL: LITTLE LEAGUE STORIES ON PBS IN APRIL Alvarez and Kolker’s Documentary Goes Behind the Scenes on the Road to the Championships University Park, PA – (August 18, 2003) Tracy Vosburgh, station manager for Penn State Public Broadcasting, WPSX-TV announces production of Small Ball: Little League Stories, to be presented for national telecast on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in April 2004. Small Ball: Little League Stories captures the hope, thrills and excitement of players, parents and coaches as a team of 11 and 12-year-old Little Leaguers go from their small northern California town all the way to the 2002 Little League Baseball World Series Championship in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Produced by award-winning filmmakers Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker, the documentary takes viewers along for a nail-biting road trip of six intensive weeks with the Aptos, California Little League team, their inspired coaches and intensely involved parents. The documentary also highlights teams in Albany; New York, Washington, D.C. and Elizabeth, New Jersey. It visits the Ukraine where an American benefactor is introducing local youngsters to baseball for the first time. “Penn State Public Broadcasting is proud to be able to offer for national telecast a documentary that highlights such an important Pennsylvania institution as Little League Baseball,” said Vosburgh, who also serves as executive producer for the program. “We thank Little League Baseball and those at its international headquarters in Williamsport for their assistance.” “Imagine the odds of choosing a team that would go all the way to the Little League World Series Championship,” said Alvarez. “With 172,000 chartered teams playing in the United States alone, the competition is unbelievable. Only sixteen teams, eight from the U.S. and eight from abroad, survive their local and regional playoffs to go to the World Series Championship.” “We wanted to find an all star team and follow it, get to know the players, parents and coaches and see how far they would go,” said Kolker. “We heard the team in Aptos was pretty good. The kids had been playing together since they were five years old and this seemed to be their year. For most teams heading into the tournaments, the competition is so intense, it’s just a matter of time until they lose. But Aptos didn’t loose. They just refused to lose.” The Aptos team’s experience becomes a metaphor for this American institution and springtime ritual for 2.7 million youngsters in 104 countries and 50 U.S. states. While the name is often used to describe any baseball game played by preteens, Little League Baseball is a corporation with strict rules, a playoff schedule and thousands of chartered teams organized by geography and community. Little League is unique in pre-teen sports in that there is the celebrated yearly pageant of the World Series Championship in Williamsport. 1 Small Ball: Little League Stories traces the Aptos team’s quest, including the very different worlds of the players and their coaches and that of the enthusiastic and dedicated parents following along in motels. This is a team that won its district, sectional, state and regional tournament and finally reached the World Series Championship. “One of the things that became part of the story is the non-stop travel”, said Alvarez. “When you are winning a lot, you don’t know when it will end and when you can go home. If you win one round, you immediately go to the next round and then the next. At the Regional tournament and the World Series, the kids and their coaches are in a compound and the parents are in motels keeping the laundry done and trying not to be nervous wrecks. It was a wild six- week road trip.” Small Ball: Little League Stories also highlights other aspects of the Little League experience. It profiles Basil Tarasko, a retired math teacher from New York and a self-styled ‘Johnny Appleseed’ of Little League, who teaches baseball to youngsters in rural Ukraine where the game is largely unknown. The documentary visits Satchel Paige Little Leaguers, an inner city team in Washington, D.C., Hispanic coaches in Brooklyn, New York and with all star coach Frank Poleto in the suburbs of Albany, who has built his house around a batting cage for his son and his teammates. Filmmakers Alvarez and Kolker bring the same insight and humor to Small Ball: Little League Stories that they have to their other award winning PBS telecasts, including Vote for Me- Politics in America, which won a George Foster Peabody Award, duPont-Columbia Journalism Award and National Emmy Award 1997, and People Like Us-Social Class in America which was a finalist for the 2003 duPont Award. They also won a duPont Columbia Journalism Award for Louisiana Boys-Raised on Politics in 1993 and a Peabody Award for American Tongues in 1988, which launched the PBS series P.O.V. Other productions include MOMS in 1999 and Sex: female in 2003 for the Oxygen network. “We love to hold up a mirror to America,” said Alvarez. “All our films take a subject that is fun and interesting as a jumping off point to look at something larger about American culture and how Americans live.” “Little League fits right in with our broader interest in American society,” said Kolker. “It’s a game, yes, and one played very intensely by kids and adults. You can find out a lot about family relationships in America by looking at Little League.” Small Ball: Little League Stories is a production of Penn State Public Broadcasting in association with The Center for New American Media. Executive producer is Penn State Public Broadcasting Station Manager Tracy Vosburgh. Partial funding has been provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Williamsport-Lycoming Foundation. For more about Little League, PSPB suggests the book published by Penn State University Press, Play Ball! The Story of Little League Baseball by Lance and Robin Van Auken. Lance Van Auken has been a manager, coach and League vice president; currently he is director of media relations 2 for Little League. To order call (814) 865-1327. Penn State Public Broadcasting, WPSX-TV and WPSU-FM, serves 29 counties in central Pennsylvania, including Williamsport, with programming and educational services. Licensed to Penn State University, PSPB is part of the Outreach Department. Other nationally distributed PSPB productions include Legendary Lighthouses and the educational series What’s In The News. ### 3.
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