One catch: McConnell's passport had expired, and the group was leaving in two weeks.

"I said I'd love for you to go," Madison said, "but I don't think it'll happen. He said, 'Coach, don't give up on me. If I can get a passport, I'll be there.' "

Two days before the group was supposed to leave, McConnell and his mother, Debbie, drove to Washington D.C., sat in a quickie passport office for six hours, obtained the required documentation and drove home.

Thirty-six hours later, he was on a plane to Santo Domingo.

"Everything had to work out perfectly for me to go on this trip," McConnell said, "and it did."


The Dominican Republic is the eastern half of the island of Hispaniola. It's bordered by Haiti to the west, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and the Caribbean Sea to the south.

View/Submit Comments for this story

The country takes up 18,704 square miles, roughly the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined, with a population of 9.65 million.

Average household income is approximately $8,200 annually, according to recent data. The country's primary exports are listed as textiles, nickel, sugar, cacao, coffee and tobacco, though a case can be made that the most visible export is baseball players.

You could fill a hallway at Cooperstown, or at least assemble an amazing All-Star team, with Dominicans. Start with Hall of Famer Juan Marichal and the Alou brothers — Felipe, Matty and Jesus.

Of more recent vintage, there's Sammy Sosa, Pedro Martinez, Mariano Rivera, Albert Pujols, Robinson Cano, David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, Miguel Tejada and Vlad Guererro. The list of Dominican major leaguers past and present is remarkable.

"Baseball is such a huge part of the Dominican culture," Madison said. "It's almost like soccer in Argentina or Brazil. On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the most popular, baseball is a 10. Basketball is probably a 4 and everything else is 3 or below. Almost every boy in that country wants to play baseball."

The country is so rich with prospects that every Major League club has an academy on the island. It's not uncommon to drive through the city streets or the poorest villages and see kids playing some form of baseball with balls of yarn, broomsticks and rags.

"It's kind of a wake-up call for a college baseball player like me," McConnell said. "A lot of times college athletes see their sport as their job and that's the way they treat it. Dominicans come out and play baseball like it's their last game. Seeing how they treat the game puts the love for baseball back in your heart."


Fifteen college baseball players from all over the southeast made the trip to the Dominican Republic, led by Madison and John Zeller.

Madison was head coach at the University of Kentucky for 25 years before he retired in 2003 and later caught on with SCORE. Zeller is the executive director of SCORE International. He is a former college coach and served as chaplain for the New York Yankees.

Though they were the trip leaders, the stars of this particular mission might have been a Dominican named Giovanni, who served as translator, guide and middle man, and the local bus driver who steered the team to remote locales over paths that were roads in name only.

As McConnell wrote in the blog diary he kept, after one trip: "This morning Giovanni navigated our bus driver deep into the middle of nowhere through flooded dirt roads at 5 mph. We either hit every single pothole or drove with triangle tires because I almost got a concussion."

McConnell said that there was no daily itinerary or set schedule. Giovanni, he said, each morning phoned around to different villages. He spoke to local pastors or organizers to set up a game and some time afterward for the Americans to explain why they were there and to discuss their faith.