Rick Dell, The College of New Jersey’s head baseball coach and Coordinator for Game Development in Asia and the Pacific for Major League Baseball (MLB), recently participated in a Bringing Baseball to Vietnam delegation that was designed to introduce America’s national pastime to the Vietnamese people.  The purposes of the tour, which was held in conjunction with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, included the conducting of two major baseball instructional events, the provision of more the $60,000 worth of sports apparel and equipment to the Vietnamese, and raising awareness of the Memorial Fund’s Project RENEW™ mine-action program in Quang Tri Province

 

The tour started in Hanoi and ended in Hue and Dong Ha, the site of the bloodiest fighting during the Vietnam War. The MLB delegation, which included Dell, Vice President of MLB International Jim Small, MLB Program Manager for International Game Development Mike McClellan, and Cleveland Indians relief pitcher Danny Graves, met with Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations (VUFO) President Vu Xuan Hong to discuss introducing the game to the Vietnamese people. Graves was accompanied on this historic trip by his wife, Andrea, and his mother, Thao, who is Vietnamese and had not returned to her native country since she left in 1974.

 

An exhibition was held at the National University for Sports and Physical Culture (NUSPC). A crowd of 2,000 cheered Graves, who said he was proud to be from Vietnam. The delegation later traveled to the town of Dong Ha to Le Loi High School for a ribbon cutting ceremony dedicating the first baseball field in Vietnam. Dell delivered remarks on behalf of Major League Baseball and The Tomorrow Fund to almost 800 assembled students. He promised to send two coaches to Vietnam this upcoming summer for two weeks to conduct clinics and teach certification courses.

 

Following the ceremony, Dell organized and conducted a clinic with McClellan and Graves. Le Loi High school had 100 students in full baseball uniforms for the clinic. Dell was then interviewed by Bryant Gumble for an HBO “Real Sports” segment that will air this summer.

 

The baseball delegation was part of a larger humanitarian and mine-action program started by the Memorial Fund in 2000. Project RENEW™, the first comprehensive management approach undertaken in Vietnam to restore the environment and neutralize the effects of war, is a cooperative venture between the Memorial Fund and the Quang Tri Province People’s Committee that has reduced the risk of the more than 350,000 tons of unexploded ordnance left from the war. While in Quang Tri Province, the delegation toured an emergency ordnance disposal site to see how landmines are cleared and how much ordnance remains to be completed.