Swinging for the fences:Trio spreading love of baseball to Mexico

A pair of local kids play catch using gloves and a ball that Jeff Cogbill gave them on a trip to Isla Mujeres, Mexico in 2011. 1 / 2

Jeff Cogbill wasn’t sure what game the kids were playing when he came across them on a 2010 trip to Isla Mujeres, Mexico, near Cancun.

"I was driving around the back of the island," he recalled. "A lot of people don’t get in their golf carts and drive back there. But there’s people living in shacks. And I saw kids with stick and rocks and I finally realized they were trying to play baseball."

The lifelong baseball lover and 11AA youth coach in Hudson returned home and told his son, Aries, what he had seen. Without pausing Aries responded, ‘Dad, we have all this baseball gear laying around. Why don’t you go back and give it to those kids?"

So Cogbill returned to Mexico in 2011, and again in 2013, bringing with him as much gear he could scrape together.

"It was on a very small scale, maybe five bats and 10 baseballs," he said. "But the kids were ecstatic."

Now Cogbill is planning another trip, on a much larger scale, and he’s asking the people of Hudson and the surrounding area to help.Cogbill and his son Aries, a senior at Hudson High School, are hosting two events in October to help collect as much used baseball gear as possible and help raise money to pay the baggage fees to deliver the equipment to Isla Mujeres […]

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