Long Island baseball players win gold at Maccabi Games

A team of talented baseball players from the Long Island region represented their country earlier this month at the world’s largest Jewish youth sporting event, the JCC Maccabi Games. The tournament offers Olympic-style sports competitions to young athletes — and the baseball team not only earned the opportunity to compete on the world’s stage in Houston — but they also took home a gold medal.

The 16-and-under baseball team, comprised of 14 athletes — including 12 Long Islanders — are all stand out players who compete at high levels of play on their high school and travel teams.

All athletes that participate in Maccabi Games must be Jewish, and the baseball tryouts took placed in September and October of last year. In total, 27 players tried out, and 14 made the final team.

The roster changed slightly over the course of the last few months, due to injuries and illnesses, among other things. The final 14 that traveled to Houston included Zach Adelstein of Merrick; Dylan Baron of Commack; Jacob Bursztyn of Syosset-Woodbury; Alex Demas of Merrick; Toby Harris of New York City; Hunter Kass of Plainview; Dave Lieberman of Syosset-Woodbury; Josh Mandel of New York City; Charlie Shapiro of Great Neck; Ryan Steinberg of Syosset-Woodbury; Samuel Swedarsky of Woodmere; Ian Yegidis of Merrick; Derek Yormack of Merrick; and Holden Cohn of New Jersey.

Mark Rosenman, the team’s head coach, is originally from Seaford. He’s long been involved in youth baseball, and has coached travel teams for years. Right after the pandemic, he said Maccabi was looking for coaches, and he volunteered.

The team trained during the winter offseason at the Long Island Field House, an indoor facility in Hauppauge — but after that, many of them got caught up in their high school and travel seasons, which Rosenman expected.

“We didn’t have the entire team together outdoors at all, because they were all playing in high school and then they rolled into their travel season,” he said. “But really in the winter workouts, when they were all together, each one of them were watching each other in the cage, and they really knew that this team could be special, and they kept pushing each other.”

In Houston, games were played between Aug. 4 and Aug. 9 at Rice University. The real-feel temperature consistently exceeded 100 degrees, but the team powered through the heat and ended up as the second best seed going into the knockout round of the competition, which they ultimately ended up winning. Overall, the boys never lost a game.

“Among themselves, they knew they had a chance to do something special,” Rosenman said. “And they just kept pushing themselves.”

As the team was practicing earlier this year, Rosenman said a point he tried to get across to the players was that the tournament is about more than baseball. “It’s not about winning or losing — it’s about them being proud,” he said.

For their accomplishment, the players were honored by the Long Island Ducks at Jewish Heritage Night on Aug. 18.

Rosenman told the Herald that he had full confidence in the team heading into the tournament — and knew that the players had what it would take to win gold.

“I told them when they packed their suitcases to leave an extra space to bring back the gold medal,” he said, “because that’s the confidence they gave me. They set their goal, and they really worked hard to do it. I think it’s an experience they’ll never forget.”