Steve Bandura woke up in a White Hall hotel room Sunday morning feeling a little bit under the weather.
Flu-like symptoms, said Bandura, the coach of the Philadelphia-based Anderson Monarchs, a youth baseball team that arrived in Arkansas this weekend as part of s 23-day barnstorming tour of various landmarks of the Civil Rights Movement.
"I'm not going to miss this," Bandura said of Sunday's activities. "I'll just be miserable."
The 15-player squad, a mix of black and white athletes, has received extra attention because about half the roster took part in last year's Little League World Series, including Sports Illustrated cover subject Mo'ne Davis.
The presence of Davis, especially, is why three different film crews are following the team, including one from Major League Baseball, which helped fund the trip. There is also a CNN.com reporter and an online blogger.
Bandura said he welcomes the attention about the tour, but has grown concerned about the focus on Davis, 14, whose fame soared last summer when she threw a shutout in the Little League World Series.
Bandura said it seems as though all the media care about is the color of Mo'ne's nail polish.
"Sometimes it feels like we're traveling with one of the Kardashians," Bandura said. "She's a kid. I've got to protect her. ... I want them to focus on the tour that this group is doing."
Sunday started with a visit to Little Rock Central High School, then the visitor's center across the street while learning about the 1957 integration of the school from guest speakers.
The Monarchs later traveled to Lamar Porter Field -- in its 1947 Clipper tour bus that was restored and donated -- for a four-inning game against a team from Little Rock's chapter of Reviving Baseball in Inner-Cities.
The tour began June 17 in Philadelphia, headed south and then east through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
The Monarchs met Hank Aaron in Atlanta, toured the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., where four girls were killed in a 1963 bombing, and they walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. Bandura, 54, wants the players to learn two lessons over the 21-city tour that includes daily games against that city's youth teams.
"Young people can affect change," said Bandura, who has taken three other teams on shorter tours. "The movement was kids. Just high school kids, college kids. ... The second one is: This isn't ancient history. This happened in my life time."
Miles Eaddy, 13, said it's been "amazing" and "scary" what he's learned while of some of the country's harshest civil rights battles.
"To step on the same history that Martin Luther King Jr stepped on, just to do that has been amazing," Eaddy said. "Really stuck out that we were walking on the sidewalk where the [The Little Rock Nine] walked on and where the mob was talking to them."
The Monarchs' appearance in Little Rock could help the local team, too, said Little Rock RBI Coach Bob Hamilton. Sunday's game was played in front of an estimated 350 fans at Lamar Porter Field, more than usual for a league that is always looking for more participants and funding for improvements at the 79-year-old field.
"It's a great crowd and it should bring us a little bit of the publicity that we are missing," said Hamilton, who has been with the league since 2003. "Yeah. This is how word spreads."
The Monarchs won 16-5 in four innings -- Davis started at third base -- and then the two teams shared pizza and the Monarchs were given Lamar Porter Field T-shirts. They spent Sunday night at he Arkansas Travelers' game. Today, they're off to Memphis, to visit the Civil Rights Museum on their latest stop on an educational odyssey that will end July 10.
"I've had a lot of these kids since they were 3 and the rest since they were 7," Bandura said. "They're like my kids, and you want to educate your kids and do everything you can for your kids. That's what fuels it."
Sports on 06/29/2015