Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
STILL ‘AMAZING’
Las Vegas Review-Journal
The dream summer of 2014 actually began a year prior, when a group of 11-and-under All-Star baseball players were down eight runs with six outs to go against a team from Henderson in the state championship game. The Mountain Ridge Little League kids had played together for several years. Their coaching staff had watched each player grow and develop and offer the impression that such a roster might ultimately produce something altogether memorable. “We put together one of the most epic comebacks you would believe in that state championship,” said Ashton Cave, Mountain Ridge’s manager. “A switch was turned. We came back to win it. That’s when we really knew we might have something. “That’s when the magic really began.”
The following summer, such enchantment gripped Las Vegas like few sports stories have. Five years later, it remains one of the most improbable runs in Southern Nevada history.
Yes, that much time has passed.
The 73rd edition of the Little League World Series begins this week in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
Eight teams from the United States and eight international squads will compete for the right to be handed a championship banner and run around Lamade Stadium when things conclude Aug. 25.
Mountain Ridge never knew such
a moment, falling in the consolation game to Japan on the tournament’s final day before being named U.S. champion about six months later after a team from Chicago was stripped of its title for using ineligible players.
“It’s like that (Kenny Chesney) country song, ‘Don’t Blink,’” Cave said. “Five years. Blink of an eye. Gone. It’s amazing how time flies and life changes in the process.
“You live in the moment and enjoy it, and then life takes over and you go on.”
But those 14 players and the coaching staff that brought Las Vegas to a moment it had never known are not forgotten.
A city unites
Curtis Livreri was born and raised in Las Vegas, played high school ball at Western and has been a special education teacher and softball coach at Centennial since 2004.
He lived and died with each jump shot from UNLV’s national championship run in basketball, with Rebels pennants and banners and trading cards of Larry Johnson on his bedroom walls.
He is as Vegas as it gets when it comes to sports.
So when he watched Mountain Ridge become the first team in Nevada history to qualify for the World Series, Livreri didn’t think twice. He booked an airline ticket the following day and headed to Williamsport.
Without a kid on the team. Without any connection to it at all.
“I was a 12-year-old growing up here in the position of the Mountain Ridge team, trying to get there,” said Livreri, who played for the Central Little League. “We came up short. To see it actually happen and what it did for Las Vegas was amazing.
“Obviously, the Golden Knights weren’t here yet, but I would definitely compare what those kids did to the 1990 UNLV Runnin’ Rebels. The excitement that Little League team brought to the city was that big. Twenty years from now, those kids will still be looked on as legends for the ones who got Las Vegas to the Little League World Series.”
If it’s true your story is the greatest legacy that you will leave others, the one Mountain Ridge wrote that late August struck a prideful note across the city, as watch parties grew with each passing game and 14 boys became overnight celebrities across the valley.
Unique storylines almost always define Williamsport, and 2014 was no different. There was Philadelphia native Mo’ne Davis, the first girl to pitch a shutout in the Little League World Series. There was the team from Chicago, the first all-black team in 31 years to qualify for the event.
And, yes, there was Mountain Ridge.
It would dominate early in the week and not lose its first game of the summer until the U.S. championship, when Chicago avenged an earlier defeat in the draw by beating Cave’s team 7-5.
Then came the 5-0 loss to Japan.
It meant the Nevada t end its summer with a 1 a collaborative effort of his coaching staff of Bo and Roland Watkins, of president Kristi Black, o volunteers and donatio
Of, most importantly kids.
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A member of the Sou vada Sports Hall of Fam watched with interest a Ridge ignited the spirit
“I wasn’t surprised a (local reaction), becau there are enough peop realized what an amazi plishment it was,” Fairl would watch (Cave) tal