During the recent parade commemorating the 71st year of Warren Little League, it was a group of girls — clad in new white uniforms and sporting red white and blue eye paint — who stole the show.

Their joyous display marked a huge milestone for youth softball in the area. Now, for the first time in over five years, local girls looking for foundational skill-building in softball won’t have to travel outside of Bristol or Warren to do so.

The history of local youth softball has featured many twists and turns in recent memory, and the reason for its decline seems to depend on who you ask. The undisputed facts are that the long-running East Bay Fast Pitch program dissolved not long after an embezzlement scandal featuring its former president rocked the league in 2015. It experienced a short rebirth as Rhode Island Coastal Softball, which would eventually merge with King Philip Little League of Bristol after less than two years in an effort to field enough teams for competitive play. Eventually, likely due to low registration, girls who signed up for the softball program at King Philip were merged in with boys playing Little League baseball.

This paper has documented in the past the efforts to boost registration and volunteerism within King Philip. But even despite those efforts, registration for young girls took a nosedive into the low single digits during the Spring of 2017, with many opting to play different sports or travel softball teams and programs based out of towns outside Bristol and Warren, and even outside of Rhode Island into southern Massachusetts.

Charlene Ferreira experienced that tumult firsthand, as her oldest daughter played for all iterations of the aforementioned programs before moving onto playing for Kickemuit Middle School. Ferreira joined the board of King Philip to help secure sponsorships, and soon enough her younger daughter became old enough that she was interested in playing t-ball with King Philip. Ferreira said she loved it initially, but like a lot of other girls, she noticed that she began to lose interest once play got more competitive among the boys playing baseball.

“These girls would sign up, stay in the t-ball program, stay through the coach pitch program, but after that was when we would lose them. It would get more competitive, it had more rules,” she said. “It felt like we were turning a lot of the girls over to other sports.”

She said her younger daughter joined about 12 other girls who traveled to East Providence in order to play in the softball program there.

It was then that a lightbulb went off.

“I had the bright idea of, okay, let’s try to start a league.”

East Bay Recreational Softball is born
Ferreira’s experience on the King Philip board had given her the skills needed to secure donors and sponsorships to get the idea off the ground, but she knew she was missing something.

Enter Lu Frias, who had recently took over the reigns of the softball team at Kickemuit Middle School and had experience with softball leagues elsewhere in the state.

“He was like my missing piece,” Ferreira said. “I can run the organization and get the kids, I can help with practices, but situational softball isn’t my thing. He does that part of it exceptionally well.”

For Frias, the proposition made sense. Without a well-attended youth softball program, the pipeline for local girls to become skilled middle school players for the KMS team would be throttle indefinitely. Ferreira recalled when her older daughter played for the KMS team in 8th grade, some of her teammates hadn’t lifted a glove or a bat until they started playing in middle school.

“Without a feeder program, you might get one or two kids picking up a travel program, but other than that you’ve got nothing coming in,” Ferreira said.

Ferreira met Frias in March of 2022. She got to work amassing some initial money to generate interest, and then over the course of that summer the pair built a website, designed a logo, secured a 501(c)(3) for the program, and built a website. The first round of registration opened around the beginning of August.

“I got 50 kids,” Ferreira said, to which she credited that core group of a dozen or so local girls who had joined other travel teams who spearheaded the largely word-of-mouth effort to bring softball back to Bristol and Warren.

“I was not going to just have Bristol girls. It was very important that we bring in Warren,” she said. “I’ve worked with the Warren Little League, and they have been so supportive of our program…It’s not going to work if it’s just one town.”

The first season in the Fall of was less of a “season” and more of a skill building mission to get everyone onto a more level playing field.

“We didn’t do teams because there was no way we could have a game. You have 50 kids, most of which have never played softball,” she said. “Our biggest thing was skill development and teaching them the throwing, fielding, hitting. Then as we progressed each week, we slowly started building teams.”

Frias ran all the practices once the girls had been split up into teams, which progressed through the cold months indoors at KMS during a series of winter clinics. Despite focusing on all practice and no games, the league actually picked up another 20 girls.

As of the closing of the Spring 2023 season, Ferreira had registered 100 girls — 35 of which were from Warren, whereas only 3 came from Warren during the Fall season. It’s a reality that Ferreira almost seems to be not able to believe, considering how quickly the momentum has built. The girls now have a real home at Colt State Park, a league solely dedicated to their growth in a sport they want to play, and enough players to field 8 competitive teams.

“The biggest thing is on the weekends when I go to the field at the park there and we have signs on the field, it’s got a whole new life,” Ferreira said. “There was nobody using those fields all those years, and the difference in their confidence level from week to week is incredible…They’re learning something, they’re putting themselves out there, and they are totally out of their comfort zone.”

With the future looking so bright, Ferreira said the past is just that.
“That’s all that matters,” she said. “It’s here now and I hope it will continue to grow.”

Thanks to the sponsors
Ferreira made sure to give a big ‘thank you’ to all the Spring 2023 Sponsors:

New England Softball Club; CoastalEdge Real Estate LLC; Coastal1 Credit Union; Brick Pizza Co.; DICK'S Sporting Goods; Defiance Hose Company #1; Knights of Columbus Bristol - RI Council 379; Vantage Point Realty; Eskimo King; Jra Collision Center; Makers RI; Carl F. Benevides General Contractor, Inc.; Navigant Credit Union; East Bay Printing and Copying; The Beach House; Bristol, R.I. Police Department; Jaffe Orthodontics; Town of Bristol, RI; Bristol County Elks 1860; La Piñata; SAGE Environmental, Inc.; Elan Studio; Portside Tavern; BAC Roofing; and People’s Credit Union.