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05/12/2016 12:00 AMGrace Petroka recently stepped down as the treasurer of the Valley Baseball Booster Club and so now is a good time to take a look back at the last decade she spent as a fixture in the community. Grace, a Deep River resident, has spearheaded numerous campaigns in the Tri-Town area and beyond, so kids can live their dreams on the diamond.
She began by helping form the Deep River Little League in 2006 and then coordinated the Babe Ruth League. Grace also started a fall ball program that allows kids to work on their game in the offseason and she founded the Shoreline Legion baseball program that combines athletes from the Valley area with those from Old Saybrook, Clinton, Killingworth, and Westbrook, so players have the chance to hone their skills in the summertime.
Grace did all this while also working as a full-time accountant.
“I helped form many leagues over the years to make sure they could play. Any time I got a call from a parent asking about how their kids could play baseball, I found them a place, whether it was our town or for another town. That is probably what I am most proud of,” Grace says. “The friendships that were made by the kids from towns all over made it really special. My sons still have friends from other towns that will last a lifetime. To see all those kids come together to make great friends playing baseball was very special.”
Grace looked around and saw something else that was lacking for local baseball players. Football and soccer have solid organizations that support those sports and help finance their leagues and Grace wanted the same thing for the guys on the diamond. That’s why she began the Valley Baseball Booster Club in 2011 and worked as its treasurer. This led to Grace’s largest undertaking of all as the club sought to get dugouts built for the baseball field at Valley Regional High School.
“I saw that other sports had strong clubs, so I thought we should put one together. Then, we would go to the games and see our kids with no dugouts in the wind and rain or getting sunburned in the summer and we thought this was something we had to do,” Grace says. “The kids were either in the elements or we would put up a tent, so they could at least stay out of the rain. We would go to other towns and watch the games and they had dugouts, but here we were standing under a pop tent at our home games.”
The process of building the dugouts was a Herculean effort that took four years to complete and involved participation from numerous people throughout the area. Luckily, Grace’s son Ethan and fellow 2015 Valley graduate Evan Makowicki jumped on board with an unrelenting passion to raise funds. The two boys, who were just freshmen at the time, had to leap multiple hurdles before the fundraising could even begin. After finding a local architect to draw up plans and have them approved by the Deep River building official, Ethan and Makowicki had to approach the superintendent for approval and then attend a Region 4 Board of Education meeting to present their idea and to gain approval. While at a meeting, the group was informed that because of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, they were required to build two dugouts for the softball field, as well. With the workload now doubled, estimates for materials alone were in excess of $27,000.
Grace urged the boys to keep at it and so Ethan and Makowicki recruited fellow Valley baseball players David Bradbury, Peter Jones, Jacob Meketa, and Arik Sypher to pitch their idea to local businesses and merchants. While the boys went door to door to raise money, Grace organized events such as wine tastings, bake sales, bowling raffles, and T-shirt sponsorships to aid the cause.
“Now that Grace has left, it takes four of us to do the job she did,” says Carmen Suedmeier, the president of the Valley Baseball Booster Club. “She was incredibly passionate and started teams from T-ball on up. She did everything—phone calls, letters, holding events. Grace was very active in Legion baseball and was the reason we had a team last season as she formed the Shoreline Legion. She donated so much time and effort and even went to other schools to take pictures of dugouts, found an architect, got permits, helped with the designs and did so much fundraising, held banquets. She just did everything.
“The process was so involved others would have given up, but Grace kept going and said, ‘We are doing this.’ She got Ethan involved and he came in with as much passion as her and that was instrumental to making the dugouts possible. Grace also got the booster club to become an official organization as a non-profit, so we could get donations from businesses, and that was a ton of work,” Suedmeier continues. “She is so dedicated and stepped up to make the dugouts happen. The kids were literally standing under tents at the games and she made our baseball team credible because of her efforts.”
So many people, families, and businesses from the community came forward to contribute time and money to this mission, but the team was still short of the necessary funds to make the project happen. Instead of giving up, Grace and Ethan began a letter-writing campaign to local business people and Ethan was able to get meetings with both Herb Clark and Norm Needleman.
The men were so impressed by their dedication and determination that they offered to come up with the remaining amount, so the dugouts could be built. With Ethan and Makowicki helping every day, the dugouts were constructed in time for their senior seasons at Valley last spring.
On April 22 of this year, the Valley Baseball Booster Club held an appreciation ceremony to formally unveil the new dugouts. Even though Grace was the one who initiated this effort, she’s quick to praise everyone else who ultimately helped it come to fruition.
“It was amazing as these are not just dugouts to house the kids; they are done really well. So many people donated supplies, worked for free or at a discount, donated money. It really is about the community members who lent a hand and the boys’ determination to make this happen,” Grace says. “It was incredible to see them do their proposals because, at first, they were nervous and I had to drive them because they didn’t have licenses. By the end, Ethan and Evan and the others were making presentations to rooms sometimes with as many as 125 people in them. The growth I saw in them was amazing and I am so proud of them for seeing this through and I’m so proud of all the people and businesses that contributed. They cannot be thanked enough for all they did.”