CRESTVIEW — Tate Sweatt has a new appreciation for the game of baseball. The 2013 Crestview High School graduate visited the Dominican Republic last month with the Nicholls State (La.) baseball team.
“It was different,” he said of the Santo Domingo experience. "… Watching the way they love baseball and how much they love baseball — it’s really all they have to do. They really have nothing. Everybody lives in little shacks. We actually painted three houses for them … Their houses aren’t as big as the (Crestview High School baseball) field house.”
The Colonels — who played a couple of exhibition games while in Santo Domingo, beat a police team 7-4 and lost to an independent team — but Sweatt will mostly remember the kids he met. “They are actually pretty good ball players, but some of them didn’t have equipment, so we had to give some of our equipment to them,” he said. “If they had to play barefoot, they would. That’s how much they love the game.
“I had to give my glove to some of them to use. Some of us actually took the shoes off our feet so they could have something to wear. We gave them what we could — balls and bats and stuff.”
As for the field, "the infield was just dirt,” Sweatt said. “There were holes in the outfield … When you dove (for a ball), you were going to come up with a scrape on your arm or something … There were rocks everywhere.”
Sweatt said he will never see life the same way.
“Just seeing how they live — it changes you,” he said. “I have a lot more than they do, and sometimes I complain. Seeing those kids with a big smile on their faces, when they don’t have anything …
"I appreciate what I have a lot more now."
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Former Crestview baseball player visits poverty-stricken Dominican Republic