Bridgewater · Little League

Nine kids, two banners, one very large trophy, and a Grand Staircase that suddenly looked a little small.

John Barrella – The G.O.A.T. News  ·  Sunday, October 25, 2026

You plan your day around meetings and agendas, and then you turn a corner and there are nine kids in maroon jerseys draped across the Grand Staircase with two banners and a trophy roughly the size of a fire hydrant.

The Bridgewater Little League All-Stars were at the State House on Wednesday, and if you want to understand why that marble staircase looked small, consider what they did this summer.

Their state representative, Dennis Gallagher, sat at the end of the banner giving a thumbs up, which is the correct response.

District champions. Section champions. Massachusetts state champions. Then up to Bristol, Connecticut, where they went 3-0 at the New England Regional, beating Maine 7-0, running past Vermont 11-1, and taking the regional final from Gray-New Gloucester, Maine, 8-0.

That last one was something. Dominik Mombeleur struck out 14 over five innings and gave up two hits. Asked about it afterward, he delivered the finest four-word summary in the history of the postgame interview.

“I was on today.”

Yes you were, Dom.

It was the first regional championship appearance in the league’s 74-year history. Seventy-four years of Bridgewater kids playing ball, and this crew got there first.

Then they went to Williamsport. Actual, honest-to-God Williamsport. They played in the Little League World Series, and Gov. Maura Healey sent them off with a note before the elimination game. They lost a 2-1 heartbreaker to New Jersey and then ran into a buzzsaw out of Hamilton, Ohio, which is a sentence that would have read as pure fantasy back in June.

Jackson, Luke, Dom, Callan, Jude, Cam, RJ, Anthony, Tristyn, JJ, Calvin and Eamon. And manager Tim Zackrison, who put it best back in August: “We’ve had a ton of support all summer.”

Standing in that hallway, you got the sense the support has not gone anywhere.

What stuck with me was not the banners. It was that they still looked a little surprised to be there. Nine kids on a staircase built for governors, grinning, holding up the thing they earned. Somebody is going to tell this story at a wedding in about twenty years.

A word, since this is a first. I have spent this outlet’s run so far on deficits and audits, missing votes and permits nobody pulled. This is the first sports story I have ever published.

I played Little League myself, a long time ago and a long way from here, and I never got within a thousand miles of Williamsport. But I remember the parents in lawn chairs and the ping of an aluminum bat and the feel of a game that mattered a great deal more than it had any right to. Whatever these twelve are carrying around this week, they will be carrying it for the rest of their lives.

I could not have asked for a better one to start with. Twelve kids from a town like ours, playing a game their grandparents played, on fields somebody’s neighbor mowed, coached by people who were never paid a dime for it. They went further than any Bridgewater team had gone in seventy-four years. And the all-American part of it is not the banners or the trophy. It is the mowed fields, the unpaid coaches, and a whole town quietly deciding these kids were worth the trouble.

Congratulations, Bridgewater. You did your town proud, and you did the whole region proud.

Photo posted with permission from one of the team’s coaches. Tournament results and quotes are drawn from published coverage of the New England Regional and the Little League World Series.