Life: Baseball heaven? Nah, just Dad, son and a week in Cooperstown | tournament, coyotes, baseball, one, final

Life: Baseball heaven? Nah, just Dad, son and a week in Cooperstown tournament, coyotes, baseball, one, final - OCRegister.com
ONEONTA, NY On the final day of a baseball tournament in upstate New York, 11 Orange County little leaguers stopped being 12 years old.
They played their last game before rules required them to move to the upper divisions. One final game before facial hair and deeper voices and girls.
One final shot at 12-year-old glory.
One of their dads, Curt Yocam, who works in the medical supply business with its requisite travel and deadlines and pressure, had been saying all week what the other dads had been feeling.
"Look at them," Yocam said more than once – in between the batting practice, shoulder punches, towel snaps, resounding farts and kids meal chicken strips. "Wouldn't it be great to be them?"
On that final Thursday, the Saddleback Coyotes, a travel ball team of kids from the Tijeras Creek and Trabuco Canyon little leagues, played in the semifinals of the Cooperstown All Star Village Tournament. They had made it to the final four among 24 other teams from across the United States.
It had been a week-long tournament, held between the maple trees about 20 miles from the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Baseball heaven.
Before the week was over, one of the Coyotes would accomplish Babe Ruthian feats with his bat, one potential Coyotes superstar would not be able to finish the tournament, and one Coyotes dad, the guy who put the whole trip together, would be coaching his final baseball game.
And the Coyotes' bunkhouse would smell like a mixture of old cheese, Napalm and feet.
Over the first four days of the tournament, the Coyotes won seven of eight games outscoring their opponents 97-26. On that final day, they needed one more victory to play in the championship game for a 6-foot trophy and a level of pride they would never forget.
The Coyotes led the semifinal game, 4-3, in the sixth inning against the Jax Beach Whitecaps, a terrific team from Florida.
On their final day as 12-year-olds, the Coyotes needed two more outs to seal the victory.
• • •
The genius behind this baseball dream was Mike Jenkins of Rancho Santa Margarita. Jenkins is a little league coach who attended the Cooperstown tournament last year. His phone call came in February, asking my son Dylan and me if we wanted to go.
He wanted to win the tournament, no doubt about that. But he said something else in that first phone call.
"You will have the best time you and your son have ever had," he said.
His genius was this: Instead of asking us to turn over our sons to him for a week, Jenkins invited each player's father to become a "coach" and stay in the bunkhouse with the players.
He sold us all on the ultimate father-son roadie. (As it turns out, no other team in the Cooperstown tournament had eight dads/coaches staying in the bunks).
Each father-son tandem paid $1,330 for the accommodations.
• • •
We flew into Kennedy Airport in New York on July 25 and piled into two rental vans for the four-hour drive upstate. We took a wrong turn in the Catskill Mountains and found ourselves in Woodstock.
Yes, that Woodstock.
We had to explain to the kids – most of which had never heard of the place – that history had blossomed just outside the little town during the 1960s when hundreds of thousands of nearly naked people converged for a rock concert. We told them about Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills and Nash.
Suddenly, a scream in the back of the van.
"A HIPPIE."
Standing on the street corner, as if preserved from 1969, was a real, live hippie with a ponytail, tie-dye t-shirt and a beard. The kids looked at him with wonder, like he was Big Foot or a breathing museum exhibit.
Their education had begun