Happy New Year!
Please click here to access this letter as a PDF with photos!
As we enthusiastically look forward to a new year and a new season of baseball, we also look back on 2022, and there is so much to be thankful for!
The year started off with our pre-season in conjunction with the team from APU. Our Skills and Drills programs are so successful in building players’ confidence and skills because of the dedication and enthusiasm of the APU ballplayers! We thank Paul Svagdis for beginning this program with us, and Kirk Nieuwenhuis and Aaron Roose for allowing their ballplayers to continue to donate their time to our program. Special thanks to Ryan Faulkner for organizing the APU players.
Our 2022 Spring Season was a home-run under the leadership and guidance of our amazing coaches. Our managers Bruce Hunt, Tom Albert & Ray Bustillos, Steve May & David Hughes, and Jeff Grable ensured that it was a positive season for our Pony players, and their coaches Luke Lewallen, Jeff Obert, Tom Hynes, Dominic Gonzalez, Dan Ellis, Zak Gardner and Matt Dunn contributed so much as well. Congratulations to the Angels coached by Steve May and David Hughes for their come-from-behind season standings to take the final Championship!
Our 2022 All Star Team was an outstanding group of young men who represented Glendora proudly. Ten of our All Stars have made their high school freshman teams and our manager, Bruce Hunt, is now the GHS JV Coach, and coach Tom Albert is the JV Assistant Coach. Both men are skilled coaches and incredible mentors, and while Glendora Pony is sad to lose them after over a decade, we look forward to continuing to work with them for the boys in the community. The 2023 GHS Freshman team has 11 Pony players on the roster, and the 2023 GHS baseball rosters combined have 39 athletes who have played in our programs!
Our 2nd Summer Wood Bat season began at the close of the HS CIF season and provided the boys an opportunity to decompress and enjoy ‘summer’ nights playing the game they love as the Trash Pandas, Yard Goats, Flying Squirrels and Honey Hunters.
Our 2022 Fall Season was outstanding! Under the leadership of Tyler Herges, APU again returned for our Winterball Skills and Drills. We are always excited to get to know our new players coming up from Little League, and welcome back returning players. A very special thanks to APU ballplayers Tyler, Andrew, Spencer, Chantz, Josh, Steven, Doug, Daniel, Joey, Cameron, Carson, and Aeden Alexander and Diego Frey, who continued working with the 9th/10th graders preparing them for HS tryouts.
Our Fall Wood Bat season is in its 15th year and was led by coaches Bruce Hunt, Darron Jones, Steve May and Adam Montes. In Wood Bat, there is tremendous pressure on these coaches to help the boys get ready for their high school tryouts, and our coaches were completely up to the task!
Our 13th annual City of Hope Charity Tournament was outstanding despite the challenges brought by Mother Nature! Six very strong teams participated, and our own Glendora team took home the CHAMPIONSHIP!! Again, our thanks to coaches Adam Montes, Steve May, and Bruce Hunt for their time, dedication, and competitive leadership!
Glendora Pony Baseball has always been dedicated to charitable giving, and this year was especially heartwarming as we celebrated Chris Vega’s 10th “Angel”versary. Our 10th annual COH Blood Drive was an enormous success with over 100 people coming to donate to honor Chris’s memory – the Bloodmobile staff had to turn donors away at the end because of the overwhelming numbers which was amazing!
Our annual donation of Amazon gift cards to City of Hope’s Pediatrics totaled almost $2000 this year, and Annie and Anthony Vega made the delivery in person on December 21st to nurses Ginger and Georgie, who took care of Chris ten years ago at CoH. Local fire stations collected toys for Spark of Love in Chris’s memory and the turnout was great!
And, since October, over a $1000 has been raised for the GHS Scholarship awarded yearly in Chris’s memory!
Finally, we closed our 2022 baseball year with our 4th annual softball tournament with the Dalton Hotshots, APU baseball team, and our own coach/player team! It’s always a wonderful night of fun and fundraising, both for City of Hope and Hotshot UP, which raises money for the families of fallen firefighters.
Our thanks to Anthony Powers for working with us every year to make this happen and thanks to Steve Brunett for the great photography!
To end our 2022 baseball year, a very special thanks to those who donate so much time and experience behind the scenes to make everything work. Matt Calicchia is a jack-of-all-trades and does so unbelievably much to make the league a better place. Ray Bustillos is not only a coach, but the league vice-president, and his presence in the booth makes all the big games go smoothly! He has given so much of his time to the league and the boys without ever having had a son in the league. Steve May brings so much expertise to maintaining the playing field and has spear-headed so many critical improvements over the last few years. Our congratulations to him for joining the GHS coaching staff! Dave Cates has also given so much to the league, and we can never thank him enough. And Bruce Hunt never fails to answer the call for help and has dedicated countless hours to the league.
It was a wonderful year at Glendora Pony Baseball, and we look forward to all our 2023 programs! For our players and families who will be coming back to Pony, we can’t wait to see you again. For our players who have aged out of Pony, we look forward to seeing many of you as your GHS Freshman playing field, and for all our alumni, we hope to see you back in Summer Wood Bat! To our new families and players, we are very excited to have you join our baseball family. We firmly believe in providing your boys with a positive and supportive environment in which to grow and develop as players and young men, and we are committed to ensuring a fair and level playing field for all. Ours is a true community program dedicated to ALL players, regardless of ability.