The year was 2005. Myspace was dominating the social network landscape. Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat were not invented, “selfie” was not a part of normal lexicon and people did not get rich by posting photos with well-placed hashtags.
Before the proliferation of social media, it was very difficult to build anything from the ground up. Besides a brilliant idea, it required a massive amount of word-of-mouth testimonials and plenty of hustle.
The league we now know as the “Boys of Summer” didn’t even have a name.
It was simply a league consisting of 14 travel teams primarily from eastern Suffolk County playing on a few of the local high school fields.
Fast forward to 2016 and the league had exploded in size to 240 teams from all over Long Island–plus Queens–playing on 110 fields.
So how was it able to expand 10 fold in a decade?
The man responsible for the massive growth is 25-year-old Gregg Sarra Jr. The former Hofstra pitcher often gets confused for a grounds keeper or an innocent bystander at the games due to his involvement in every facet of the league. That doesn’t bother him one bit.
“I think that’s the coolest part,” said Sarra Jr. “Just talking to the parents and coaches and having that personal connection and availability to the teams. Sometimes I feel like I’m the ‘undercover boss’ being able to find out what people are happy or unhappy about,” he added.
After finishing his playing career, he was just looking for a way to stay involved with the game of baseball and took over the day-to-day activities of the league in 2013. Since then, he is responsible for the scheduling of the games, dealing with the rain outs/make-up dates, setting up the tournaments and All-Star Game and just about everything else–right down to handling field maintenance and running the social media accounts.
With what amounts to a full-time job, it’s hard to believe he does it in his free time. He is a Data Science Manager at Five Element Analytics in Merrick during the day but still makes time for the league. He noted that he will often respond to emails after 2 am and people wonder what he’s still doing up at that hour. He added that it’s important to him that he keeps the lines of communication open and he answered every email individually.
“When you go the extra mile, people really appreciate that.”
Some of the big turning points for the league was the expanding of age groups down to 13U and up to 18U. Also, the addition of the All-Star Game at Bethpage Ballpark (Ducks Stadium), regular season games at Citi Field and their tournaments (Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Columbus Day).
Sarra Jr. believes some of the success is due to the ability to offer the opportunity to play at Citi Field, an experience he got to enjoy during his playing days.
“You just look up and say ‘WOW!’. It’s one of the coolest things–you get such a rush. Everyone is waiting on you. It really gets the adrenaline going,” he added.
With great power, come great responsibility, though and he admits there are some challenges in running such an operation.
Sarra Jr. pitching for Hofstra
“Sometimes people will tweet at me asking if their game is cancelled without even saying what team they’re on. I’ll have fun with it and say ‘well, I don’t know team you’re on.”
Another obstacle is his travel limitations. Family obligations or work-related travel will often leave him out of the area and unable to deal with league-issues on his own. In this time, he relies on a few critical members of the operation. His brother, Jeff, and a few of his close friends are relied upon during that time to prepare the fields and make sure they are adequate for game play while he is glued to his phone and laptop monitoring any other issues that may arise.
He stated that the ability to offer exception dates and a rolling registration date is critical to the league. When teams play in tournaments and are unavailable to play their league games, he will make every concession to accommodate their requests. Additionally, he noticed teams would ignore the deadlines for registration due to their focus on school ball, which is why they eliminated the deadline.
All told, the league has featured many of the top players that have come from Long Island since its inception in 2005 including Marcus Stroman and Steven Matz, who played for the Paveco Storm in 2005.
Despite his young age, Sarra Jr. has been able to handle the high-volume of the league while allowing for it to continue to grow.
What’s next?
“The one thing we haven’t been able to do is book Yankee Stadium at all,” he said. “We’re hoping to get that done in the future.”
You can follow them on Twitter here or visit their website here.
