Titans turn tragedy into triumph

Howard Rondinone stood by the first base side bleachers as he watched his son in left field. It was June 2013, and his 12-year-old was playing for the Rangers in the Kingsbridge Little League championship at Cooney Grauer Field.

Suddenly there was the sound of gunfire and smoke filled the air near right field.

Parents frantically shrieked, “Get in the dugout! Get in the dugout!” as kids bolted to the sidelines and laid on the ground.

The shooter wanted to settle a dispute that took place in a park on Bailey Avenue near West 233rd Street, and fired six bullets into a crowd. One of those bullets struck a 9-year-old girl in the stomach.

The girl survived after being rushed to the hospital, but Rondinone had seen enough.

“Kids were completely shocked,” he recalled. “And that was one of the reasons why at the end I said, ‘Why don’t we just get out of here?’”

Rondinone had a plan. He wanted to start a travel baseball team that would get kids who took baseball seriously out of Kingsbridge and have them play teams from other communities.

There is a stark difference between travel and recreation baseball. Recreation ball is about learning, having fun and about everyone getting a turn. Travel ball is more competitive and about playing to win.

The program started with one team of 14 local athletes and quickly grew to three teams. It added two more teams this season, giving kids aged 10 to 16 a chance to play.

The club flourished to the point where the Uptown Sports Complex could not fit the teams anymore, and the program had to become independent. It became a 501 (c)(3) charity, obtained city permits to practice at P.S. 24’s school gym and became known as the Titans Baseball Club.  

The goal of the club is to get kids ready for college showcases and get them exposure to receive scholarships. It trains athletes three to five times a week and schedules anywhere from 60 to 100 games per season from April to November.

The club has played in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and upstate New York. All of this, however, comes at a price.

“A lot of these kids come from all over the Bronx,” Rondinone said. “So they’re all different financial situations. Their parents, some can afford it, some can’t. Some are on welfare. We don’t turn kids away for their finances. The program costs $800 a kid and if a kid comes with $100, we have to get the other $700 somehow.”

The club will operate on about a $60,000 budget this season and only 50 percent of it comes from parents paying registrations fees. The rest comes from fundraising and donations.

The program was built for players like Brayant Morel from High Bridge. At just 14-years-old, Morel walks around at practice with the confidence of Derek Jeter and the leadership of Joe Girardi.

Morel was asked by a coach to fill in for a tournament game, and his passion was hard to miss. The coach was impressed and asked Morel if he wanted to be added to the roster. Since joining, his grades have gone up, he’s gone to religious classes on weekends, stayed out of trouble and was part of the team that won the Triple Crown championship last season.

“You don’t really find a lot of coaches that care about kids, like personally,” Morel said. “These coaches, they make sure you’re not in the streets and you got your school grades, that you respect your family and you work hard. They just care about you as if you were a kid of their own.”

Rondinone said Morel is one of the best players on the team, but his neighborhood will taint the way colleges look at him. That’s where the club comes in to help.

“The kid is an amazing baseball player,” Rondinone said. “But his block, statistically, is not going to make it. Colleges don’t want him because of the way he lives. So it’s up to us to really mold him into what they want.”  

The program was built for players like Carlos Herasme Jr., 14, from Kingsbridge, whose dad is a coach on the team. Herasme Jr. wants to use baseball as a platform to get to college so he can become a computer or mechanical engineer.

Like Morel, he knows the importance of hard work on the field and off. As he wrote on the team’s Facebook page: it’s about keeping your ERA down and your GPA up.

“This is one of the best environments you could be in,” Herasme Jr. said. “There’s people that come off the streets that don’t know how to act, and they come here and it’s friends. It’s a friendship, and it’s a brotherhood that we have over here.”

In February, players from the club were featured on the Bronxnet TV show “Real Fans Real Talk.” A few days later, they appeared on TV Exclusivo, which is broadcast throughout the five boroughs as well as South and Central America.

The Titans will begin their season this week, but it’s clear that they have already been crowned champions off the field.

“We’re all like brothers,” Morel said. “We all basically want the best for each other.”