They’ve been walking on air for weeks. But less than a month after bringing home the Little League World Series championship, the young All-Stars from El Segundo embarked on a journey that would take them 1,000 feet above their hometown.
“You’ve done many things before, but this is probably better than a few of them, I think,” Louis Lappe, the star player of the storybook squad, said shortly before the ride, “because it’s like going on the plane, but like a luxury plane.”
Brody Brooks, another star on the team, said his parents had already asked him to take photos during the ride.
“It’s pretty unique,” he said. “It’s definitely way bigger in person than I thought it was, just like, looking up.”
On Friday afternoon, at least eight players and three of their coaches from El Segundo Little League boarded the Goodyear Blimp, a semi-rigid airship operated by the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.
The blimp took off from the company’s Airship Base in Carson. From there, it headed over the Hawthorne Airport and flew towards the southside of the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), where the passengers caught glimpses of their El Segundo home fields around 1,000 feet above the ground.
“A lot of big office buildings are 1,000 feet tall,” said Adam Basaran, assistant chief pilot at Goodyear. “So we stay relatively low to the ground, that way people can see the airship, and then when we do this type of passenger ride, you can look down and enjoy that, because everything’s not so tiny that you can’t recognize it.”
Back in August, the El Segundo Little League took home the championship title by defeating Curaçao 6-5 in the Little League World Series finale in Williamsport, Pa.
The 12-player team became the first from California to clinch the title since Huntington Beach’s Ocean View Little League in 2011, and the first in Los Angeles County since Long Beach won the championship in 1993.
They had to overcome many challenges…
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