Syracuse Challenger Baseball Information

In 1982 Syracuse Challenger Baseball was created by a group of parents in Eastwood. They wanted a safe and fun place for children with special needs to play baseball. Under the District 8 Little League umbrella the first set of teams were created. By 2003 that small group of children and parents had grown to 6 teams with 12 players and 72 children. These teams had no home field and traveled to Liverpool, Lyncourt, Mattydale and Eastwood to play their games. In 2004 Dom Cambareri became League Director. He followed in the footsteps of former Challenger Directors including Skip Soule and Bob Nelson. He knew the special needs community was growing and wanted a way to accept every player without putting any child on a waiting list. Dom Cambareri is the father of two of the players on the league. He owns the law practice Cambareri & Cambareri and is a long time sponsor of the Green team on the Junior Division. In 2005 Dee Perkins became Deputy Program Director and self appointed "League Photographer. Through the years she has added technology to the league to make calling out to the players easier using a pre-recorded phone message, she built the first Challenger website and continues to update it and added facebook, twitter and youtube accounts as well. During the Field of Dreams grand opening she used Facebook Live to broadcast to the community the first look at the new fields. In 2007 two new senior teams were created to allow older and more skilled players to play beside their fellow teammates. These teams have thrived and now grown to close to 20 players on each team. In 2016 JJ Petrikus, a Little League Coach and baseball educator, was added as a skills coach to continue to grow the abilities of our players. In 2011 thanks to the guidance from Jon Law from CNY Agency we were able to bring on four new sponsors that allowed us to expand the Junior Division by four teams. The league had doubled and was on it's way to tripling in size. In 2015 Little League approved our request to create adult teams. The league ...