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Baseball Hall Of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. (left) signs a baseball for Danielle Henderson following a news conference
Buffett
Cal Ripken Jr. appears at the Bragg Hill Family Life Center in Fredericksburg yesterday. He was kicking off the youth baseball project he's planning for the area. |
The Ripken brothers came to Fredericksburg yesterday with some good news for their foundation's plan to help city youth.
Local philanthropist Doris Buffett had agreed to jump-start the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation's Play Ball! Fredericksburg program with a $1 million matching grant.
Buffett said yesterday that the grant is an all-or-nothing offer. The community must raise $1 million to get it. She said her Sunshine Lady Foundation "strongly suggested" that a one-year deadline be set on the challenge grant.
She said she hopes the announcement of the gift will energize and lend urgency to fundraising efforts for the Ripken Foundation's wide-ranging plan for Fredericksburg.
That plan includes baseball and softball equipment grants to youth-serving groups like the Bragg Hill Family Life Center, where yesterday's press conference with Cal Ripken Jr. and his brother Bill took place.
It also includes character education programs in area schools, an effort to get law enforcement officers involved as coaches and mentors and other efforts to help kids make good choices.
Those things are already getting started in the community and, at a later point, the foundation will partner with the region to build a baseball field complex whose location has yet to be determined.
Cal Ripken Jr. called the gift a "marvelous" way to jump-start the foundation's work.
"We're looking forward to creating a model here that works," he said. "We're not in it for the attention. We love the celebrity and the attention that we can bring to it, because it's a valuable tool."
Buffett agrees.
"Cal Ripken is deservedly an icon," she said. "I'm looking for anything that helps kids. No one approach will do it all, but this is just another string in our bow."
The Ripkens set up the foundation to honor their father, who was a player, coach and manager in the Baltimore Orioles' organization for 37 years.
"I don't think that people today know what Dad actually stood for," said Bill Ripken, who played Major League baseball for 12 years. "The influence he had on [Cal Jr.] is really the real reason he's the Ironman.."
The Healthy Choices, Healthy Children curriculum the brothers created to carry on their father's lessons--which is already being used in city schools--includes lessons on sportsmanship, communication, work ethic and other things they feel Cal Sr. taught on the field.
"He used baseball a lot of times to get kids' attention, but he really wasn't talking baseball to them, he was passing on life lessons," Cal Ripken Jr. said.
Ripken Sr. died in 1999, and the foundation was established in 2001. The brothers said they started it as a mostly local operation out of their home base in Aberdeen, Md.
But the group has since expanded its programs into other areas. Its board of trustees includes representatives from business, state and local government in several areas of Virginia.
The Fredericksburg program marks the first time the group has partnered with one locality on such a wide range of programs.
"This is a great area to be in," Bill Ripken said, adding that building relationships with partners like Buffett helps them spread their message a lot further.
"We can do certain things, but when you align yourself with the right people," he said, "I can just see this thing going very big."
Emily Battle: 540/374-5413
