It took a mere two years for the Pitt County Girls Softball League to infiltrate and rise up the Little League ranks and rocket straight into the World Series.
Those closest to the PCGSL were perhaps the least surprised of anyone. The team changed allegiances in 2020 from Babe Ruth to Little League, not coincidentally the same year Little League announced Greenville’s Elm Street Park as the new permanent home of the Softball World Series.
“It doesn’t surprise me a bit. Looking at the Little League teams, I knew we’d be extremely competitive,” longtime Pitt County softball organizer and administrator Bo Batts said of the team’s quick qualification.
Batts was one of the founding fathers of the PCGSL back in the mid-1990s, and he has been witness to dozens of titles on the local, state and national level since then.
“If everything hadn’t gone so off-kilter during the COVID year, I think we probably would have been there last year,” he said.
There was an immediate reaction across the region when Little League International came to Greenville in early 2020 to announce Elm Street Park as the LLSWS’s new home. In Winterville, the hub for the PCGSL the last three decades, the news came with a question: How soon can we make the switch from Babe Ruth softball to Little League softball?
That question was not quite so easy to answer back then. After all, the PCGSL was arguably the most decorated youth softball program in the country in the Babe Ruth ranks.
“I’ve been a Babe Ruth guy from the get-go, just because I’ve been involved every single year except the first year of the league,” said Batts, who served as a Babe Ruth district commissioner for 20 of the 27 years the PCGSL was aligned with the organization. “Babe Ruth had been good to us and we had been good to them. We were considered — and I knew this from the Babe Ruth headquarters in New Jersey — the premier Babe Ruth organization in the United States. So it took a lot to do the change.
“I’ve kind of come around now.”
Batts said as soon as The Daily Reflector published its first story about the World Series coming to Greenville, people were asking him what he thought would happen with the PCGSL. Batts said he knew the league would pounce on the opportunity, even if some like him were initially reluctant to leave the Babe Ruth ranks that had become synonymous with Greenville teams.
After the first LLSWS slated for Elm Street Park was wiped out by the pandemic, the 2021 PCGSL team fell one game short of qualifying to play at Elm Street, losing to the same perennial powerhouse team from Rowan County that the PCGSL club had to beat to qualify this summer.
Pitt County’s Harper Bradley, left, and Clara Allen, right, finish off a handshake during Tuesday’s practice.
Craig Moyer/The Daily Reflector
Batts said the PCGSL’s primary motivation beyond having the chance to have a hometown team in the World Series and on ESPN was the hope that the change in affiliation would boost overall interest in the league after participation had dipped some in recent years.
Two active seasons later, Batts said the numbers have gone back since the change, and he estimated there were 25 teams in the league this summer with between 275-300 girls playing.
“It is based on the fact that they thought maybe a change to an organization that does have a higher visibility than Babe Ruth would be good for the overall, long-term well-being of the league,” Batts said. “I think the biggest difference (between Babe Ruth and Little League) is television. The fact that Little League has got the contract and the perception that if you want to be seen, this is the league you need to be in.”
The PCGSL originally formed in 1993 with 17 teams playing, and Batts began working with the league not long after, helping the fledgling organization grow rapidly from its origins in Pitt County Community Schools. The league exploded almost immediately, with 645 girls playing in 1995 for 41 teams. The league boasts 11 Babe Ruth World Series titles.
“We won four state championships in ‘96, and that started that incredible run where — I don’t know anybody else like this outside of Pitt County — we pretty much dominated all the age groups for about 10 years, won just about every title in every state, district, whatever we had to play in,” Batts said.
Batts attributed the fall in participation numbers in the years that followed mostly on the rise in different opportunities for girls in the spring and summer, pointing specifically to the rise of lacrosse and volleyball in the area.
“It’s still amazing to me what we’ve accomplished in 30 years, the facilities we’ve done, the championships we’ve made,” Batts said.
