Making a Little History: Starkville Ready for Southwest Little League Regional

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**NOTE: Buffalo Wild Wings in Starkville will be showing the Starkville Little Leaguers game on Friday at 8:30pm. The game will be on the Longhorn Network.

STARKVILLE, Miss. (WCBI) — It is baseball in its purest form.

Kids playing the game they love. But these aren’t your ordinary Little League all-stars you’re watching; these kids are Mississippi’s Little League Champions.

Oh, and they just so happen to be the first from the Northeast Mississippi area…ever.

“First team in 50 years is really awesome,” Aiden Fancher said. “I think we’re a good characteristic team. Our bats are still good and we just play really well.”

“We just play together and have fun,” Riley Dawkins said. “No matter what the score is, if we’re losing or winning, we have fun.”

“It’s a lot of kids that have played a good bit of baseball at different levels,” head coach Tom McReynolds said. “To come together as one squad and accomplish this for our community is outstanding.”

It truly is a special group of kids coached by Tom McReynolds. The Starkville Little League All-Stars earned the right to play at the Southwest Regional in Waco, Texas over two weeks ago.

The kids are ecstatic to play in the lone star state but more importantly and more impressively, they are proud to play for their home state.

“We just want to go down there and represent Mississippi,” Dawkins said. “We want to do something nobody from around here has done before.”

“It will be exciting to be down there and see the sights and we’re going down there trying to represent Mississippi as a whole,” Nasir Brown said. “We’re trying to do our best and go to Williamsport.”

Williamsport happens to be the historic site of the Little League World Series every year in late August.

As you take the time to be around the team, you sense a Williamsport feel to them: a silent, yet goofy confidence has turned the kids from regular baseball players into big time believers.

That makes for a dangerous team that has the potential to make it all the way.

“Our bats are hot and we have great pitching and we play as a team,” Luke Altmyer said. “I don’t think we can be beat.”

“As a kid growing up playing rec baseball, I can’t think of anything that would be more special,” McReynolds said. “These kids have watched the World Series on TV since they were 5, 6, 7, even eight years old. To have that opportunity to do that would be very, very special.”

Starkville will have that opportunity as they are just four wins away from a trip to Williamsport, Pennsylvania and a crack at the Little League World Series.