Sports
Community Batters Up to Fight Cancer, Support Family
County-wide event raises over $10,000 for pediatric cancer patients, including a 7-year-old Centreville boy.
When someone is put in the situation that Rob Hahne was this past fall, "your world changes very quickly."
"You now have a child with cancer," he wrote on the website he and his wife, Madison High School teacher Kieran Hahne, created for his 7-year-old son Kyle.
"It is obviously something that nobody wants to deal with it but we really don't have much of a choice. We have to deal with it and we have to be strong for all of our children. That isn't always easy but it is a necessity," he wrote.
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Kyle, just six at the time, was diagnosed with leukemia in the fall of 2010. But one thing that hasn't changed for Kyle, his parents or siblings Robert and Maddie is Kyle's love for baseball.
Over Memorial Day weekend, 22 little league teams from the D.C. region gathered at fields across Fairfax County to play in the first-ever Kyle's Kamp Wood Bat baseball tournament. The three-day tournament raised more than $10,00 for the Children's National Medical Center for pediatric cancer care, through individual and team donation and wood bat, t-shirt and food sales.
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Most of the teams gave a team tournament donation of anywhere between $75 to $300 in place of a tournament registration fee.
"[Kyle] is a big baseball player," Hahne said. "[We are] playing some baseball in his honor."
Each game of the tournament began with a moment of silence for pediatric cancer patients. Coaches also remind the children why they are playing whenever possible, Hahne said.
"This is the inaugural tournament," Hahne said. "We plan to do this for years to come."
Hahne has a long history in local baseball and Little League. He's coached across Northern Virginia and the world, from McLean to JV squad, and in Parma, Italy, training kids for Major League Baseball. He's also the General Manager and Director of Baseball Performance Training, a company based out of Chantilly, and is well-known in the Centreville community for his leadership in SYA.
The winners of the tournament were the Annandale Fire (13U) and Westfield Spartans (14U).
"Kyle is truly our special little buddy who continues to amaze us with his strength, his determination and his un-ending positive demeanor," he wrote on the website. "I know speaking as his father, I truly wish that I could be like him someday."
