For Little League baseball coach Tom Otis, it's all about having fun

Tom Otis isn’t concerned about wins or losses.

The East End Little League coach prioritizes that the first and second-graders on his team have fun while improving their skills.

Otis was named the Little League Baseball Coach of the Year by Lance Snacks, the Positive Coaching Alliance and Little League. He was honored in a pregame ceremony in Williamsport, Pennsylvania on Aug. 19 during the Little League World Series.

“He cares about every player unconditionally. He doesn’t have favorites,” said Bill Dawson, the president of East End Little League. “He embodies the ethos of Little League, which is about character, commitment and sportsmanship.”

Five days before the ceremony, Otis’ wife, Kim, gave birth to their third son, August. They left Stony Brook Hospital at 1 a.m. on Aug. 18, giving Otis and his older sons Thompson, 7, and Winston, 6, enough time to head to Williamsport.

Otis met Todd Frazier and threw out the ceremonial first pitch before a game between Ohio and Nevada alongside Tennessee’s Hannah Moeller, who was named the Challenger Division Coach of the Year. Otis and Moeller were each awarded a $5,000 grant to use toward their leagues in the future.

A Quogue resident, Otis is the vice president at Otis Ford and is on the fundraising committee with Kim at East End Hospice, where they help organize an annual fundraiser. Following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, Otis is a lieutenant in the Quogue Fire Department.

“Giving back and helping people is just important to me and it’s a big part of my life,” Otis said.

It can be a challenge to keep the attention of such young children in the coach-pitch division, but Otis developed games and drills that kept the players engaged while teaching them the fundamentals.

Otis filmed every game by attaching a GoPro to the backstop. After each game, he picked out highlights for each player and sent those clips to the child’s parents so that the kids could relive those moments.

“At the end of the week, I would put together a video with all of highlights together, which the parents loved because they could send it to relatives who couldn’t make it to the games,” Otis said. “But the main reason I did it is for the kids. My son who is about to be 8-years-old loves that stuff.”

For the last two games of the year, Otis used an app to announce each player as they walked to the batter’s box, along with a walk-up song of the player’s choice.

“You could tell that the kids had a blast,” Otis said. “Our attendance was great. Having a 6 and 7-year-old, I know what it’s like to have my son not want to go somewhere. But the kids wanted to be there and it was really rewarding in that sense.”

Otis also rotated the players’ positions every inning and used a spreadsheet to keep track of everyone’s positions on a weekly basis to make sure it was divided evenly. He credits much of this season’s success to the open communication he had with the players’ parents and their willingness to help him as “unofficial assistant coaches.”

“I’m really trying to accept this more as an award that we won as a team,” Otis said. “Between myself, the parents that helped me coach, the players and the energy they brought every day and also the league as a whole and all the other coaches that step up to the plate and make time to coach these kids.”

Added Dawson: “I’m grateful that his team’s parents took the time and effort to nominate him. In our highly competitive world today, it seems like it’s always about ‘me’ instead of ‘we.’ He’s not about that and these parents are not about that. They nominated him because he sees the best in every kid and truly makes a special personal connection with each of them.”