El Segundo All-Star slugger Louis Lappe, it turns out, can do more than just hit an historic walk-off homerun to win a Little League World Series championship.
He’s also skilled at meticulously placing pumpkin seeds onto a thin line of glue.
During the last day of dry decorating at Rosemont Pavilion on Thursday, Dec. 28, Lappe, Brody Brooks and the rest of the world champion All-Star team from El Segundo were pitching in on the DirecTV float that will carry them into history at the 135th Rose Parade on New Year’s Day.
The job: Squeeze out a row of glue and line up the seeds end-to-end to define the lines at the float’s front-left side in the shadow of a large gold championship trophy.
Lappe managed the task effortlessly. His teammate Brooks, working to his left, struggled a bit, placing too thin a coat of glue. The seeds wouldn’t stick.
“Dude, you want me to help you?” Lappe asked as he tossed a neat line of glue Brooks’ way.
Lappe’s mother, Kathy Narahara, stood by and watched.
“This is so cool to see this through the eyes of the boys,” she said.
It’s funny to think, Narahara said, that the now-mostly 13-year-olds were, at one time, all in kindergarten together. And now they’ve accomplished so much.
She brought Lappe to the Rose Parade when he was around that age, she said. They sat in the grandstands.
“This is a completely different perspective eight years later,” she said.
Narahara thought back to another parade.
In August, the boys, along with 19 other teams, were loaded onto flatbed trailors for a ride around South Williamsport, the Pennsyvania site of the Little League World Series. There was a light rain, she said. That procession struck her as historic — and is one she’ll never forget.
“This will be similar,” Narahara said. “Just a lot bigger.”
The enormity of riding in America’s favorite New Year’s Day event, on a Rose Parade float, and even that of winning a world championship, is a little lost on…
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