The Taney Dragons. It’s become a household name. The Taney Dragons, Philly’s first baseball team to ever qualify for the Little League World Series. The Taney Dragons, whose player Mo’ne Davis is the first girl to earn a win and pitch a shutout in Little League World Series history and also the first player to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a Little League player. The Taney Dragons, who returned from four weeks on the road to meet the Phillies and hear Mayor Michael Nutter diagnose the city with “Taney Dragon fever” during the city’s welcoming parade.
Yes, the Taney Dragons. How about the name Alex Rice? He’s an important player in this story. He’s the star team’s manager, father of one of the players and also a Drexel alumnus.
Alex Rice started coaching the Taney Dragons about seven years ago, once his son turned six. He joined the league just a few years after he completed his Drexel architecture degree in 2002.
“I was working full-time and going to Drexel in the evenings for an additional degree. Then, Little League took the place of academics,” he remembers. “Guess I like to keep busy when not working.”
He’s certainly kept busy this summer. The Dragons, representing the mid-Atlantic region in the Little League World Series, won their first two games before being eliminated by the eventual champion team. Rice and the team were expecting some press out of Philly, but he recalls the bus ride from Bristol to Williamsport was “the fall down the rabbit’s hole,” after the team started receiving media requests and later found out that that Mo’ne was on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Even after placing third out of the 7,000 Little League teams in the country, the Dragons still had a jam-packed schedule, highlighted with an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC’s “The Today Show.”
“Baseball took over our lives,” he says. “In my ‘spare time,’ I work as an architect. I’m joking – sort of.”
After a brief end-of-summer vacation in New England, Rice is now back at work as an architect, and his son and his players have gone back to school. But this summer’s whirlwind adventure, and the ending that brought the team back to Philly’s homecoming parade, will last forever, he says.
“I had no idea the impact the team was having back home until we got back to Philly. It was truly unbelievable and incredibly gratifying to have been a part of something the whole city took such pride in,” he says.
The connections between the Drexel Dragons and the Taney Dragons are many. The team’s first baseman, Joseph Richardson Jr., is the son of Chanel Ward-Richardson, a systems analyst manager for Drexel’s Office of Academic Information & Systems; and his
sister, Gabrielle, is a current student at Drexel, in the design and merchandising program. One of the founders of the Taney Dragons league, Stephen Rosenzweig, has two children who are Drexel Dragons. His son Eric has a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a master’s in library science. And his daughter Jessica is currently earning her MBA at Drexel.
In fact, it was Eric Rosenzweig who was credited with solidifying Taney’s mascot.
“We were kicking around the idea of making a dragon our mascot at a board meeting one day and [Eric], who is an artist, did the first rendition of Taney Dragon,” says Stephen Rosenzwieg, one of the team’s five founders. “But,” he cautions, “there are a lot of [connections between Taney and Drexel], but the Dragon isn’t one of them.”
That might have been too perfect.
So what will next year be like for Rice and the team?
“We’re still working on 2015 team plans,” he says.