After coming so close last year to becoming the first team from Africa to play in the Little League World Series, players from Uganda had their hopes dashed again this year. But the obstacle had nothing to do with baseball.

 

Some of the players of the Rev. John Foundation Little League team from Kampala were denied entry into the United States to play in the Williamsport, Pennsylvania, series because they could not provide sufficient paperwork for visas.

 

In Uganda, birth certificates are not commonly issued, and without proper proof of age and identity, the State Department would not issue visas to everyone on the team.

 

The team nearly qualified for the World Series last year after beating Saudi Arabia in a qualifying tournament, but they then lost the next day to Kuwait and were eliminated because of a bizarre tiebreaker rule that punished them for scoring two runs in the final inning of their game against Kuwait. Because of a quirk in the rules, a scoreless final inning would have advanced them to the final. This year the Ugandan team qualified by defeating a team from Saudi Arabia that was primarily made up of the children of Americans working abroad.

 

Baseball was introduced eight years ago to the Ugandan children by American Richard Stanley, a part owner of the Trenton Thunder, the New York Yankees’ Class AA minor league team. Stanley had originally gone to Uganda as a volunteer for a UN-sponsored vegetable oil development project.

 

“This would have been huge for kids all over Africa,” Stanley told The New York Times. “This is a great opportunity to expand the sport. All these kids want is an opportunity to go out and play. They have the talent. They don’t have the facilities.”

 

Jay Shapiro, a supporter who had been working on a documentary about the Uganda Little League, acknowledged to The New York Times that the application paperwork was incomplete and the problems should have caught before the team even took part in its regional qualifying tournament.

 

Little League officials said that the last time a qualified team didn’t make it to the Little League World Series was 1959. The children of U.S. Army personnel in West Germany qualified, but were unable to raise enough money for the journey to Williamsport.

-Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky

 

No Little League World Series for Ugandan Team (by Lynn Zinser, New York Times)

For Uganda Little Leaguers, Exhilaration and Then Heartbreak (by Paul Post, New York Times)

Ugandan Little Leaguers Denied Visas (by Genaro Armas, Associated Press)