Honoring the Past by Focusing on the Future (Published 2022)

NASHVILLE — It’s fitting that the Nashville Stars, a team limited to players 10 and under, are named after an old Negro Leagues team that played in Music City in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. From the aggressive base running to the all-black coaching staff to the announcer who blasts a mix of hip-hop and R&B from the stands, the Stars embody the energy and excitement that made pre-integration black baseball a cultural phenomenon as much as a sporting attraction. The team also serves as a stark contrast to the stereotypical image of American youth baseball.

For the kids on this team, most of whom are black, baseball isn’t a stopgap measure to keep them afloat until football season starts, or a free activity sponsored by the community organization that may or may not receive funding from Major League Baseball. For these kids, baseball is both a passion and a purpose.

As Major League Baseball and the broader sporting community celebrate the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the tendency is to look to the past, to examine what Robinson’s groundbreaking efforts accomplished—and, ultimately, what he failed to accomplish. Robinson’s willingness to turn the other cheek and his ability to succeed in the face of overt racism may have made him an icon and a hero, but it hasn’t made the sport any less hostile to black people in general.

Today, the number of African-American players in the majors is at its lowest point since the 1950s, when some teams had yet to sign a black player, and the number of black kids in the sport isn’t much higher. According to a report from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, just 11.1 percent of black American kids played baseball in 2018 — a statistic that affects the number of athletes who compete at the highest levels.

This lack of participation is often attributed to the high costs associated with youth baseball and a general lack of access to the sport for many black youth in their urban neighborhoods. But the Stars are not an “inner-city kid” team, and many of the black parents in the program have no problem buying $300 bats and paying extra training fees. Here, their children find refuge from other challenges that plague the youth game, and thanks to the leadership of black men committed to carrying forward Robinson’s legacy, they are able to play the game they love without compromise.

The origin of a team

According to Ro Coleman Jr. and DJ Merriwether, who coach the Stars with Xavier Turner, there was never a real team.

They both grew up around the game — Coleman in Chicago and Merriwether in Nashville — and though they took different paths after high school, they knew they would eventually return to the community and plant a love of baseball in the hearts and minds of a new generation of black kids. They also both believed they would be most helpful by giving kids the deepest training possible and then sending them off to play for other coaches.

Then fate and necessity struck.

After playing at Kentucky Wesleyan and then Crichton College in Memphis, Merriwether returned to Nashville and launched Beyond the Diamond in 2016. The developmental program offered youth baseball coaching with a focus on helping kids get benefits from the sport beyond a college scholarship or a chance to play pro ball.

“For me, the whole thing wasn’t that every kid was going to make it to the big leagues,” Merriwether said. “It’s about using baseball to create other avenues for kids, like it’s created for me. Being able to network, being able to meet a lot of different people from a lot of different places. Being able to sit at tables that I never thought I’d be at. That’s what baseball has done for me.”

Eventually, after much pleading from parents dissatisfied with other programs in town, he decided to put together a team. Going it alone took its toll, but Merriwether persevered, noting that he believed if he just “kept planting seeds and trying to build baseball around the city, eventually some things would come together.”

The connection that changed everything came in 2019, when he was introduced to Coleman and Jarrod Parker, the former major league pitcher who was selected ninth overall by the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2007. After spending two years rehabbing a chronically injured elbow, Parker decided to open a sports training facility, later offering the space to Coleman and the group of training clients he had begun to cultivate.

Coleman, a former standout at Chicago’s Simeon High School, had won a national championship with Vanderbilt in 2014 before being drafted by the Detroit Tigers after his senior year. He now says the minors were a drag, and with a degree under his belt and no guarantee of a big-league spot, Coleman decided to hang up his cleats and move back to Nashville to focus on the work of his life. Like Merriwether, he knew that baseball could have a profound impact on the lives of black kids.

“Growing up, my friends and I wanted to make a difference, and we didn’t realize at a young age that we would have the impact that we have now,” Coleman said. “We just wanted to see more black people playing the game at a high level.”

Parker was sold on Coleman’s vision, and Merriwether proved to be the missing piece that would allow Coleman and Parker to reach an even broader audience. And in 2020 — after partnering with Music City Baseball, an organization working to bring an MLB expansion team called the Stars to Nashville — the Nashville Stars youth program was born.

“It was something special to see another black man in Nashville trying to create opportunities in baseball for African-American and other minority kids,” Coleman said of Merriwether. “It’s the same passion that Jarrod and I had when it came to investing in the kids. He’s a genuine guy; we clicked; and it just kept going.”

Playing where they should be playing

The Stars launched a team for players 17 and under (17U) in 2020, and after a successful first season (players have already committed to Vanderbilt, Stanford, and several smaller schools), Coleman and his team decided to field teams at the 13U and 10U levels in late summer 2021.

The decision to field a 10U team came just in time for Brandon Hill, who had just moved his family — including his 10-year-old son, Brendon — from Hoover, Alabama, to Nashville. Hill says Brendon fell in love with baseball early, and Hill has been on the lookout for Black-run teams from a young age.

“I didn’t want him to be treated differently,” Hill said. “I didn’t want to be part of the good ol’ boy system, or be in a situation where a coach is like, ‘Well, he should be playing there, but he can’t because my friend’s son wants to play there and we’re going to have beers on the weekend.'”

While experts often talk about the financial barriers to youth baseball, these parents know that many of the issues that plague the sport at the professional level—the isolation black players feel on teams where few, if any, players look like them, the pressure to move into positions stereotypically associated with black players like center field, and the unspoken rules and political maneuverings that wear down even the most tenacious athletes—pervade youth sports as well. Along with economic challenges, these are the issues that prevent more black kids from playing the sport.

Before joining Merriwether’s Beyond the Diamond team and eventually ending up with the Stars, Christopher Gordon’s son Austin played for a predominantly white program in a suburb just south of Nashville. Though the team had a solid reputation, Gordon says Austin was pushed into the outfield because the infielders were often the coaches’ children.

“For me, as his father, I had to make a decision that he needs to be in a program that really invests in him,” Gordon said. “If he’s an outfielder, he’s an outfielder. But I want it to be fair; a level playing field.”

Merriwether moved Austin to second base and now alternates between pitching and other infield positions. Gordon says he’s having a lot more fun, too — and not just because he’s playing a different position.

The total program cost is about $2,400 per year, Coleman said, or comparable to that for most competitive travel teams. Empowerment Striving The foundation works together with parents to cover costs as much as possible.

According to parent after parent, black and white, the emphasis on having fun while remaining competitive sets the Nashville Stars apart from other programs in the region. “You go from parents doing it as a second job to coaches doing it as a career, and the level of investment and quality of coaching just improves overall,” said Kristen Menke, mother of infielder Max Goetz.

Gordon agrees. “It’s great to have a program with coaches of this caliber, and to be able to give the kids this kind of exposure to the sport that honestly, growing up, I didn’t even know existed,” he said.

Dealing with setbacks

Sometimes, however, that exposure isn’t positive. During a tournament in Lawrenceburg, Tenn., a small town on the Alabama border, the Stars encountered a group of hostile parents from an Alabama team.

“I think they were shocked to lose to a team that was majority black, and they didn’t behave well,” said Menke, who is white. “They felt like the referees were calling the shots in our favor, when in reality, they were calling the shots the same way.”

Although Merriwether said the coaches didn’t hear anything on the field, parents said they heard the other team’s parents use the n-word and make other crude statements.

It was a wake-up call for Menke. She said she had never experienced anything like it, but in retrospect she was more certain that she had made the right decision by letting her son join the Stars.

At the same time, Merriwether’s previous experience allowed him to lead the team and focus on “controlling the controllables.”

“His dad was there and he said, ‘We’ve been dealing with this all the time when DJ was growing up,’ that this kind of stuff has always plagued black baseball,” Menke said. “And I’m thinking, ‘If our mission is to change baseball culture, we can’t tolerate this anymore.'”

“There is a community within the team, but it’s also about the team being a reflection of the community.”

Andrea Williams is a freelance writer in Nashville and the author of “Baseball’s Leading Lady: Effa Manley and the Rise and Fall of the Negro Leagues.”