Hardball

A Season in the Projects

de Daniel Coyle

Four blocks from Chicago's affluent Gold Coast, the Cabrini-Green housing project looms, a notorious inner city of poverty, violence, and despair. Not an easy place to play ball. But in 1991 two men - one black, one white - started a Little League, twenty teams sponsored by Chicago corporations. Daniel Coyle volunteered to help coach one of the teams, the First Chicago Near North Kikuyus, and the following season, he decided to record their story: fourteen remarkable children and their six coaches, an unlikely group thrown together on a baseball field in the midst of Cabrini's gang-ruled streets. From the team's first practice to the end of all unexpectedly triumphant season, Hardball chronicles the Kikuyus, on the field and off. Coyle brings us into the lives of children both carefree and exultant at play yet disarmingly sober in the face of their family circumstances, kids startled by the sight of cows and cornfields during a trip to Iowa yet inured to the sound of gunshots at home. With frankness and poignancy, he tells of the team's joys, losses, and small but essential victories, and of the neophyte coaches whose role moves haltingly from teaching baseball to being big brothers, disciplinarians and ultimately friends. Hardball is a powerful story of a team's struggle against the odds, a struggle that in the end speaks to the most important concerns of our time and to the resilience of children everywhere. In the Kikuyus we see not only a deeply troubling image of the way things are, but also a hopeful glimpse of the way they might be.