The Major League Baseball Urban Youth Academy is a youth baseball academy located in Compton, California providing free baseball and softball instruction to Southern California youth, ages 8–17.
Encompassing 10 acres (40,000 m2) on the campus of Compton Community College, the MLB Urban Youth Baseball Academy features state-of-the-art facilities including a show field; complete with scoreboard, a grandstand that seats nearly 200 fans, dugouts and lights; as well as an auxiliary field; softball field; youth field; and a 12,000-square-foot (1,100 m2) clubhouse consisting of a weight room, locker room, and other training facilities. The complex also features batting cages and pitching mounds.
The Academy operates on a year-round basis under the leadership of former Anaheim Angel Darrell Miller. An after-school program, week-long clinics accommodating approximately 200 youth per day is held, as well as month-long clinics. Over the course of the first year of operation, the Academy expects to offer the free program to a minimum of 2,500 youth.
Plans will continue on opening the leagues second Urban Youth Academy in Hialeah, Florida outside of Miami, also to coincide with the Florida Marlins new MLB Stadium in Little Havana. A third academy in Houston, Texas opened in April 2010.
Famous quotes containing the words major, league, baseball, urban, youth and/or academy:
“Our basic ideas about how to parent are encrusted with deeply felt emotions and many myths. One of the myths of parenting is that it is always fun and games, joy and delight. Everyone who has been a parent will testify that it is also anxiety, strife, frustration, and even hostility. Thus most major parenting- education formats deal with parental emotions and attitudes and, to a greater or lesser extent, advocate that the emotional component is more important than the knowledge.”
—Bettye M. Caldwell (20th century)
“We’re the victims of a disease called social prejudice, my child. These dear ladies of the law and order league are scouring out the dregs of the town. C’mon be a glorified wreck like me.”
—Dudley Nichols (1895–1960)
“The salary cap ... will be accepted about the time the 13 original states restore the monarchy.”
—Tom Reich, U.S. baseball agent. New York Times, p. 16B (August 11, 1994)
“And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there.... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,
And where care lodges, sleep will never lie;
But where unbruisèd youth with unstuffed brain
Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike—and I don’t think there really is a distinction between the two—are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.”
—Harold Bloom (b. 1930)