For Pitt County fans, the 2024 Little League Softball World Series will be remembered as the one where the home team, back in the final game for the second consecutive year, won it all.
For some others in Little League, it might be remembered as the year the series battled the rain all the way to the finish.
As the North Carolina host team, Pitt County Girls Softball League made it through the weeklong series with five straight wins in which it never gave up a single run. The series itself made it through Tropical Storm Debby, which cost it two-and-a half days of play, and in the end gave up only one game, a third-place consolation matchup.
Minutes after North Carolina won 1-0 over previously undefeated Louisiana, another deluge began. Fans waiting outside East Carolina University’s Max R. Joyner Family Stadium to offer high-fives to passing players got a farewell soaking to cap off a wet week.
In many ways, it was reminiscent of the first Little League Softball World Series. The inaugural tournament, played in Freeport, New York in 1974, was plagued by bad weather but reportedly drew 1,400 fans for the championship game.
Yolanda Espino Fiedler remembers it well. Although she was only 16 years old at the time, she was coach of the winning team from Wellswood Little League in Tampa, Florida. Her mother, Sylvia Espino, was manager, and her kid sister, Sandra, played on the team.
“It was pretty much just rain, a little lightning and thunder but just rain,” she said of the weather that first year. “Every time there was lightning in the area they’d postpone the game for 20 minutes. Coming from Florida, this was typical for us.”
What wasn’t typical was the kind of fanfare that surrounds the series today. Fifty years ago, there was no EPSN. The girls got coverage in the local newspapers. Nobody was asked for autographs or got to see themselves on TV.
“We didn’t have that, but it didn’t matter,” Fiedler said after she and eight players were honored at Joyner Field on Sunday. “It was all about going out there. We loved doing it.
“The difference was these girls that have come to play and work their way into the series knew the direction and what was coming next,” she said. “We didn’t; it was the first year.”
Little League Director of Softball Operations Ashlea Miller said that during the early years of the tournament, games only lasted a few days because of the number of teams. (There were four the first year.) Since the series did not expand to its current format of 12 teams until 2021, she said, it is likely that the half-dozen games played on Friday represent a single-day series record.
Before Tropical Storm Debby dumped flood-level rain across much of the Carolinas, this year’s series had gotten off to a four-game start on Aug. 4 at Elm Street Park’s Stallings Stadium, which has hosted the Little League Softball World Series since 2021. By the third day of play, rain cut the four-game schedule to two and kept girls off the field for the next two days. On Thursday, the decision was made to resume play the following day at ECU’s softball field, rather than at Elm Street.
Fans, including David and Janet Peltier of Rhode Island, grandparents of Lylah Riley from the New England team, eagerly awaited the return to Stallings Stadium. They were concerned that some differences in field dimensions, including a backstop that is farther from home plate, would adversely affect players like Lylah, a catcher.
Southwest Manager Ledarrius Madison shared similar concerns in an interview Saturday as he left Stallings Stadium to prepare his team to take the field at ECU.
“The facility is beautiful,” he said of Elm Street Park. “The girls loved it. They wished they could have played over here at night.
“(ECU) is a bigger field. It’s hard for either team of this age,” he said. “(But) it was still a good thing to do to keep the games going.”
As Little League volunteers loaded souvenirs, concessions and equipment to make the 2-mile move from Stallings to Joyner stadium, players and fans stopped by Elm Street Park to pose for photos overlooking the field. Dave and Amanda Knoepp made a four-hour drive from Forest, Virginia, to bring daughter, Ellie, to the series, although Virginia’s team was eliminated at the Southeast regionals. Before going to games at ECU, they wanted a look at the field they had seen on TV.
Don Octigan, executive director of city projects and recreation services, said the park, which was rebuilt after being flooded by Hurricane Floyd 25 years ago, is a prime place to bring visitors to the city.
“This is a special place for Greenville. Everybody loves it,” he said in an interview Saturday. “(But) we can’t control the weather. We don’t have any athletic fields open at this time, which is common with the amount of rain we’ve had this week.”
He said the city’s collaboration with ECU, which began hosting Athletics Unlimited games in conjunction with the Little League World Series in 2023, helped the competition to move forward.
“This community can come together through a tropical storm, through whatever and make things happen,” he said. “It just shows how great the Greenville community is.”
Miller said that once the decision was made to move the series from Elm Street to ECU, staff members from the city, ECU, ESPN and Little League, along with series volunteers, worked to ensure that the games could begin again.
“Most importantly, we could not be more thankful to all the members of our Little League Softball World Series Committee and the City of Greenville who have spent the whole year working towards this historic event and continue to step up to help us finish the tournament under these circumstances,” she said in a statement.
Sunday’s finish required three games compared with the two normally scheduled for the final day of the series. Southeast and Mid-Atlantic region teams, which finished second in the Orange and Purple brackets, did not get to take the field for a consolation game.
But despite the afternoon heat, humidity and threat of rain, fans filled the 1,000-seat Joyner Stadium to capacity for the championship game, leaving hundreds more to watch from wooded areas beyond the outfield fence. Coach Percy Edwards said he couldn’t have asked for a better finish.
“Finished runner-up last year and we finally won it,” Edwards said as he fielded questions after the game with fellow coaches Brad Medhus and Brandon Peebles. “These last two games were really tough; they were really tough opponents.
“I’m kind of glad we did it when we did. It was going to rain,” Edwards said of a downpour that would have delayed the game if it had come just a few minutes earlier.
“That’s the tears that I don’t want to show,” he said of the rain. “That’s all that is out there.”
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