Native American reservation baseball used to be far different than it was on a sunny Saturday near Phoenix.
It’s easy for Robert Miguel to look back on the old days. He’s now chairman for the Ak-Chin Indian Community, one of 22 Arizona tribes. He grew up with the Tohono O’odham Nation and would lay in bed at night as a kid throwing a baseball up and catching it so many times, he could close his eyes and feel when the ball was on its way down.
Long before he had unsuccessful tryouts with the Cincinnati Reds and Chicago Cubs, Miguel had his own way of learning fundamentals.
Surrounded by miles of open desert, a young Miguel would refine his hand-eye coordination by hitting rocks with a stick. “Chalk” lines on a makeshift infield came from government-issued powdered milk, and bases came in the form of either cow chips or empty beer boxes.
“When I was doing that, [baseball] grew on me,” he said. “And I would watch baseball with my grandfather. We would watch The Big Red Machine, the Cincinnati Reds. So I fell in love by just watching.”
Nike’s N7 program has provided new opportunities. A camp for 250 kids took place at Salt River High School in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, a sovereign community bounded by the cities of Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa and Fountain Hills.
Nike is focused on getting youth in North American Indigenous communities moving through the N7 Fund. Since its creation in 2009, the Nike N7 Fund has awarded over $8 million in grants to more than 270 communities and organizations.
Watching kids go through fielding, catching and hitting reps looked all too familiar for Jacoby Ellsbury. As the first Native American of Navajo descent to play Major League Baseball, Ellsbury was an All-Star, Gold Glove and Silver Slugger winner, two-time World Series champion with the Boston Red Sox and MVP runner-up.
“It brings back memories for me on the baseball field and being a kid and having fun. That’s what N7 is all about, activity through sports,” Ellsbury said while watching the kids go through drills.
The Valley of the Sun has been busy this week with high-profile sports events, and N7 has been right there for each. Just a few days earlier, N7 hosted a football camp in tandem with Super Bowl 57 across town and also a golf camp in line with the Phoenix Open in nearby Scottsdale.
With pitchers and catchers having just reported for Spring Training, hundreds of plastic bats and balls helped turn N7’s focus to baseball. There were batting nets for practice swings, cones for running drills and of course shirts and shoes for the campers, plus a nutritious lunch afterward.
“Childhood obesity unfortunately is becoming high among the Native youth. So get them out, have fun and challenge them,” Ellsbury said. “Have them do something they never have done.”
While many of the kids have never played organized baseball or softball, some have. Some already have dreams, not unlike Miguel’s. Ten-year-old Marco Lopez was wearing his Arizona Diamondbacks cap while taking all kinds of batting swings and flatly said his dream is to reach Major League Baseball someday, among other leagues.
“NBA and NFL. All of them,” he said. “We’ll see what I go to.”
Others may not be reaching for a career in professional sports, but the idea of setting goals and working to achieve them was not lost on some campers.
“I know that as a hobby you must have practice. So I think it’s a very good learning experience for a lot of people,” said Zariah Miles, 13.
Miguel used lessons he learned to teach the kids. Fate may not have had him reach his goal of playing pro baseball, but he did follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, Jonas, who also served as Ak-Chin Indian Community chairman in the early 1970s. Family is an important theme for Miguel.
“What means so much to these kids is that somebody’s paying attention to them. Not just Jacoby but the [N7] staff, showing an interest in their growth in life. That means so much,” he said. “A lot of these kids here, I can guarantee, they’ve grown up in broken homes and with a number of negative dilemmas in their lives.”
The Gila River Indian Community, Ak-Chin Indian Community, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and the Tohono O’odham Nation are “sister tribes” here in the Valley. Miguel, the Salt River president and the Gila River governor all grew up together playing baseball, from T-ball and Little League.
“We share the same traditions and cultures, and our language is almost identical,” Miguel said. “For a lot of us growing up, baseball was not a game. It was life.”