Ridgefield’s 12U All-Stars Are Going to State — Let’s Get Them There

Back-to-back district champs. Three straight wins to clinch it. Now the boys are headed to Walla Walla with a shot at a state title and a Little League World Series regional bid — and the families footing the travel bill could use a hand from the town behind them.

Some towns get one good baseball story a summer. Ridgefield apparently ordered two. While the Raptors pack the stands at the Sports Complex, our 12U All-Stars just won their District Championship for the second year running — three straight wins to take it — and punched their ticket to the State Championship tournament in Walla Walla. Win there, and they earn a bid to the Little League World Series Regional. Read that sentence again. Our twelve-year-olds.

Here’s the part that doesn’t make the highlight reel: Walla Walla is a four-plus hour drive from here, and a state run isn’t a day trip. Fuel, hotel rooms, meals — and if the boys keep doing what they’ve been doing, families could be there up to a week. That’s a real bill, landing in the middle of summer, on households that in some cases are juggling multiple state tournaments because — as team parent Andrea Fink put it on the fundraiser page — “they’ve raised some talented kids!”

How to help

Fink has set up a GoFundMe to cover the team’s travel costs — the fuel, the rooms, the meals, and the maybe-we’re-staying-all-week contingency that every parent is quietly rooting for. Every contribution goes toward getting the team to Walla Walla and keeping them there as long as the winning lasts.

This is the kind of thing this town is good at. A few dollars from a lot of neighbors adds up to a team that gets to focus on baseball instead of budgets.