The Most Baseball a Baseball Town Can Be

IRMO, S.C. — At Friarsgate Park, there’s never enough parking. Whenever there’s a baseball game, the lot gets full and drivers find spots on the grass next to the sidewalk. Eventually, the parking lot over at the elementary school fills, too.

It’s only a week night, but there’s so much commotion — and this isn’t for a tournament, just fall baseball games.

“It’s the old ‘Field of Dreams,’” said Bobby Jenson, Little League president. “If you build it, they will come. If you build the right atmosphere, people will come because, if it’s 60, 70 degrees and you’re just relaxed and you’re getting peanuts or popcorn or sunflower seeds, and just watching a game of baseball — it’s just no better place I’d rather be.”

This is Irmo, South Carolina, the most baseball a baseball town can be.

Irmo is so baseball that last year it sent not one, not two, not three, but four teams in different divisions to the Little League World Series — baseball teams of up to 12-, 13- and 16-year-old boys, along with a girls softball team. Little League has seven divisions, each of which holds a national tournament of top teams every year, the World Series. Do the math: One community sent clubs to more than half the national competitions.

Irmo is so baseball that championship jerseys hang in local restaurants as relics of pride with signatures of the ball players, who are treated as local celebrities.

Irmo is so baseball that even though the South Carolina Golf Association is just a few miles down the road from the ball fields, there isn’t even a golf course in town. It closed several years ago.

It’s hard to find someone not connected to Irmo Little League.

“I’ve lived in North and South Carolina my whole life and baseball is very important here,” said Matt Westbrooks, a Little League parent. “We’re shocked that we don’t have a major league team yet. And I will tell you, Irmo Little League is doing it right. If you’re not involved, you need to be involved. It’s a great place to have your kids. It’s a great place to learn about baseball.”

Classic Southern

Irmo is 20 minutes away from Columbia and is full of Southern charm. Local businesses coexist with typical chain restaurants and retail stores, and with the South Carolina Gamecocks competing close by, there’s an SEC rooting interest.

Lake Murray is just to the west of town and has 650 miles of shoreline. The Big Bass Tour hosts tournaments on the lake each fall and spring that draw people to Irmo. But there’s always plenty of folks fishing. Some of the players often trade in bats for fishing rods.

Irmo is home to the annual Okra Strut, a two-day festival with a parade that was started by the Lake Murray-Irmo women’s club 50 years ago. Initially, the goal was to fundraise money to build a new library, but that only took seven years.

It still remains the town’s most cherished celebration, but the Williamsport team of up to 12-year-olds couldn’t attend the strut this year — the Atlanta Braves were hosting the little leaguers for their game against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Where The Magic Happens

Irmo Little League has been around for a while, and baseball has been considered America’s favorite pastime for a lot longer, so why is it just now that Irmo is so good?

One reason is facilities. At Friarsgate, there are four large fields, three for baseball and one for softball. Right at the park’s entrance, there are two smaller fields for t-ball.

The fall season for Irmo Little League is dedicated to teaching young players the game and developing skills. Scores aren’t kept, the outfield boards remain off, and coaches interrupt the game action for pivotal teaching moments. But in the spring, kids are playing to make an All-Star team with the chance to make a Little League championship bracket and coaches want the chance to make the trip North, too.

Registration for the spring starts in December and ends in the middle of January. In February, players are evaluated and the regular season teams are formed, practices begin and games run for seven weeks starting in early March.

At 9 a.m. on opening day there’s a parade — it’s a town spectacle. All teams take the field that day and Jensen said 5,000 people normally attend.

“Oh my gosh, it was like if Norman Rockwell was here today, like what he would create for a town celebration,” said Jill Giulietti, mother of one of Irmo’s star sluggers. “It was so charming.”

The fences surrounding each field and the press box structures behind home plate are covered in banners of previous Irmo Little League teams that won state championships or reached a Little League World Series. The sign from 2009 sits next to more recent champions. It might be old, but the cracks in it are an important reminder of how much Irmo Little League has grown.

The fields didn’t always have lights, they didn’t always have scoreboards, there wasn’t always a paved walkway providing better accessibility to the fields. It took commitment from the community and investing to get here.

Baseball may have come first, but softball is what put Irmo Little League on the map. In 2022, the juniors team made it to the World Series in Seattle and came in second. Their Southeast jersey is framed at Lucky’s Burger Shack — it’s the place everyone flocks to when Irmo teams play in the World Series. The lineups are always posted and the regulars enjoy knowing who to root for each night.

“You don’t necessarily have to be family to be supportive of each other,” restaurant manager Kim Laniere said. “Everybody becomes aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters, you know, they all adopt whoever the kids are.”

The Grind

Irmo is the first local Little League to send four teams to their respective World Series in one season and it sent two teams in 2023 and 2024. But it’s not so simple to make that final tournament.

“It’s very hard, and for these players and families, there’s a lot of commitment that they make,” Jenson said.

Once All-Star teams are announced at the end of the spring regular season, practices begin and they’re intense. This year’s team that went to Williamsport practiced in the evenings three to four nights a week, starting at 7 p.m. to try and avoid the heat of the day. Practices were slotted for an hour and a half but it wasn’t unusual if they ran late and the crew shut down Friarsgate.

Manager Dave Bogan prepared his players intentionally and vigorously — they worked hard. His son, Andrew, was on the team, and his oldest, Jake who also played up through Irmo Little League, now goes to Dutch Fork High School.

“They got some of the high schoolers to come down and pitch to us, like throwing 70, 75, fastball, curveball, like all the pitches to get us ready for what we’re gonna face,” said Joe Giulietti, pitcher and third baseman.

Joe was one of Irmo’s most powerful hitters and he’s not bad on the mound either. He hit a grand slam during Irmo’s first game in Williamsport and his younger sister teased him that it wasn’t even off the barrel. At Friarsgate, during the home run derby last year, he even broke a scoreboard.

“If you run cross county, which is the three-mile race, you’re gonna go out and you’re gonna train for eight or nine miles,” Bogan said. “If I can get a high school kid that’s going to throw 75 to 80, which is really fast for these boys, when we see someone throwing 60-70, they’re ready.”

Bogan had to switch fields for practice so he wouldn’t lose as many baseballs in the trees beyond the fence.

“Practice was always hard and they made it hard on purpose to face difficult moments so it would look easy and make it easy,” said Brady Westbrooks, who smacked the walk-off hit in the regional tournament that earned Irmo its trip to Williamsport.

What Makes Irmo Different?

If you’re a parent and you have a son or daughter who wants to play ball, you basically have two choices: rec or travel ball.

Recreational baseball programs such as Little League don’t always have a great reputation because they aren’t necessarily recognized as competitive as travel ball. Even the Giuliettis were skeptical.

Before arriving in Irmo because of a career move, they lived in Texas. There, Joe seemed to out-grow Little League ball. He always had a strong arm. In Williamsport, Joe never gave up a hit.

“The coaches (in Texas) were trying to teach him to either roll it or to throw a rainbow,” Jill Giulietti said. That was because they worried Joe would “take someone’s face off.” So, to put Joe in a more competitive baseball environment, the Giuliettis turned to travel ball.

That’s where they believed the best players had the best opportunities. They had no idea Irmo was such a baseball haven.

While the popularity of travel ball has skyrocketed, Irmo Little League hasn’t been affected because of the program’s commitment to letting travel and rec play coexist. The two sometimes conflict in scheduling.

Before Jenson was league president, Justun Baxter held the position for eight years and he bought into travel ball rather than trying to work separately from it.

“Justun got them involved with our concession stand and stuff like that, to where you can make a little extra money to help your travel ball team expenses,” Jenson said about Baxter’s approach. “That got travel ball players to come back (for Little League).”

Irmo Little League refrains from having its games on the weekend because that’s when travel tournaments are typically held. Now when those tournaments use Friarsgate fields, all concession sales go back to Irmo Little League. Jensen and other volunteers are typically outside of the concession stand under a tent working the grill all afternoon.

While Irmo Little League prevents travel teams from staying together — players get divided among all teams in their age group — it ultimately makes the spring regular season games more competitive.

“They get to play against each other, pitching against each other, hitting against each other, it brings back that excitement to the travel ball players,” Jensen said. “You get the better players in your zip codes and success can happen.”

Because of its recent success, Irmo Little League is expecting to have close to 1,000 kids playing baseball and softball in the spring. This fall, a record 43 teams (nearly 500 kids) played, which is nearly double the amount of participation compared with when Jensen first got involved 15 years ago.

And for a sport like softball, the popularity and excitement are only continuing to grow.

Sarah Minchew coached her daughter, Ainsley, in the junior softball Little League World Series last summer. Sarah grew up playing the game, but Ainsley was a dancer before becoming a lights-out pitcher. Sarah sees a drastic difference in the sport’s popularity because of the exposure collegiate softball now receives.

“The diamond sports, to me, are some of the most difficult games because you have to be really athletic, but you also have to be really skilled,” Sarah said. “You can’t just get by with athleticism, you have to really commit yourself to being a good skilled player too, so it’s unique in that regard, but I think girls are putting in more time than they ever have historically to this game.”

Irmo currently has its highest participation in softball with at least 250 girls expected in the spring and about 150 playing this fall.

Community Commitment

Jensen and Baxter spend nearly 40 hours every week at Friarsgate and that’s in addition to their full-time jobs. Irmo Little League is run entirely by volunteers and most parents are highly involved in the league’s operation.

There are about 200 volunteers, but Baxter said only about five “put in way too much time.” Even though his kids are too old to still play in Irmo Little League, he wouldn’t do anything differently.

“This is my home,” Baxter said, adding that he believes this league is so successful because “it’s 80% family, 20% baseball.”

Irmo is a place where many people grow up and eventually move back to and start businesses. Tre Dabney opened Chickenbutt Donuts seven years ago with his wife. He grew up in Irmo and played Little League — now he’s a sponsor of the program.

“There just hasn’t been a better place that I’ve been,” Dabney said. “And it really seems like the rest of the country is figuring it out. The secret is kind of out.”

Chickenbutt Donuts was a part of Irmo Little League’s largest fundraising year last season, supplying over 300 dozen donuts sold at the concession stand. Dabney does not see this partnership ending anytime soon.

“It’s great coaches and it’s great kids and it’s a great community supporting them along the way,” Dabney said. “When you see what they put on the field, it looks like magic, it looks like it’s just supernatural, but really, it’s about coaches working hard and kids working hard and the community putting the full force of their support behind all of them. And boy, howdy.”

Baseball Is Fun!

In a town like Irmo, baseball is tradition. The community rallies behind its clubs and in September it hosted a town celebration for the four teams that made Little League World Series appearances.

“Success is when I come down here (to Friarsgate), am I seeing a bunch of smiling faces?” Jensen said. “Are siblings who you see at other sports maybe getting dragged by the hand out of the car because their brother or sister is playing? Versus, when they get out of the car here, and they’re running to see their friends. That, to me, is success.”

Sunflower seeds coat the ground from underneath the bleachers where parents keep a close eye on the game. Siblings and other kids are running around, even tossing rocks in the air and trying to hit them with sticks while baseball is played all around them.

“You have so many people come out that are not even having to be here that night but are coming just because it’s so much fun,” Jensen said.

In the rare moments when not all of the Friarsgate fields are occupied, the lights remain on.

Kids often just play sandlot ball on the fields, nothing serious, just fun. Friends are made during pick-up games of catch or impromptu hitting practice.

“I’m sure this happens at lots of Little Leagues, I’m not saying it doesn’t, but that’s the kind of thing that makes it special,” Bogan said mid-interview, when he noticed a group of kids randomly playing together. “I don’t even know how well (they know each other) but they’re out there playing and they’re just goofing off.

“It’s just a fever about playing baseball.”

Joe, the slugger/pitching star for Irmo, certainly has that fever. After coming back from Williamsport, the first thing he did was pick up a bat and started swinging in the back yard.

“If we were the ones pushing him, I feel like it wouldn’t be right, but he wants to do it,” said his father, Jason Giulietti.

Members of last year’s All-Star teams are still deciding if they will return to Irmo Little League or not. The divisions they compete in are changing as the kids get older. But no one wants to think about next year yet — the accomplishment of making it to a Little League World Series is still sinking in.

“Imagine having a great Thanksgiving dinner and you’re just stuffed and you’ve had a great experience, you wouldn’t trade it for anything and then people say ‘Well what are you going to do for breakfast tomorrow?’ Like, you’re not ready to think about it,” Bogan said, referring to a conversation he had with his wife about baseball decisions for next spring. “That’s kind of where we’re at. We’re not really ready to think about it.”

But if not Bogan, someone will coach Irmo Little league next year. And kids will certainly be ready to play. And Friarsgate will be ready to greet them.