Fuel the Dream: getting Austin's team to Cooperstown

The trip every twelve-year-old ballplayer talks about

If you have a kid in travel baseball you already know about Cooperstown. For everyone else, it is a week-long tournament at Cooperstown All Star Village in Oneonta, New York, where 12U teams from all over the country play each other, bunk with their teammates, and trade pins with kids from states they have never set foot in. It is a 12U tournament, so a team gets one summer to do it and then the boys age out. Austin's team, AZ643 12U out of Gilbert, Arizona, is going in June 2027.

Austin is the same kid from the Stadium Escape series, the one who found the slide-tackle bug by playing the same six seconds thirty times while I read logs. He has talked about Cooperstown since long before anyone told him his team was going, because every kid in that dugout has, and the boys who went before them came back with a bag of pins and a story. Twelve players, a coaching staff, tournament fees, flights and lodging, uniforms, pins, and a week of meals adds up to a number that is a lot to ask of twelve families on their own, so the parents decided to raise it together, and the public goal is $35,000.

A name and a nonprofit

The first thing that needed deciding was what to call it. The name we wanted was Beyond the Bases, which turned out to already belong to another youth baseball nonprofit, so it went back on the shelf and Fuel the Dream came off it, and within a day I liked it better anyway, because it says exactly what the money is for.

Then we did the boring part properly. Fuel the Dream Inc. is a real nonprofit, recognized by the IRS as a 501(c)(3), which means two things for anyone who gives: the gift is tax-deductible, and every dollar goes to the team as a whole, never to any one player. That second rule is the one I care about most, because it is what makes a donation to the team a donation to the team, and not a favor to my kid.

A website in a morning

I did not want to send people to a generic fundraising page with a stock photo at the top, and I have gotten fast at building websites with Claude, so on the morning of August 27 I sat down and built one. The first commit landed at 10:29 and the tenth at 15:42, with lunch somewhere in the middle. It is a single page with no database and no login, and every campaign-specific thing on it, the goal, the venue, the sponsorship tiers, the copy, lives in one file, so that changing a sentence never means touching the code around it.

That mattered because the words were never going to be mine. Nicolette is the President of Fuel the Dream and she wrote the campaign copy, and I dropped it in over lunch. She also caught the first factual error on the site, which is that the team plays at Cooperstown All Star Village in Oneonta, about twenty miles from Cooperstown itself. "Cooperstown" stayed as the shorthand everyone in youth baseball uses, and every sentence that says where the boys are actually going now names the venue. She added coach expenses and trading pins to the list of what the money covers, which I had left off because I was thinking about the budget and she was thinking about the week.

The button that costs someone real money

The first version of the site sent donations to GoFundMe. Thirty minutes after the first commit it sent them to Zeffy instead, because Zeffy charges the nonprofit nothing and asks the donor for an optional tip, so a $100 gift is $100 to the team. Making that switch produced the one design rule I would keep from this project no matter what came next: the donate button is the only element on the page where a wrong destination costs a stranger real money, so when it has nowhere to point, it does not point anywhere. It renders as a disabled "Coming Soon" and waits. It went live at 12:28 once the Zeffy form was published, and the site moved to fuelthedream.org at 13:15.

The progress meter reads the real total straight from Zeffy, refreshed every five minutes, with the key kept on the server where a browser can never see it. Until then the meter had been showing a sample figure of $8,750 that came with the design, and the real number was $0, because the campaign was a few hours old. I replaced the sample with the zero, because the campaign really was at zero, and a fundraising page that shows a made-up total to the very people it is asking for money has already told them one lie. By the time I took the screenshot at the top of this post the next day, it read $300.

The other thing that day caught was a placeholder set before the dates were confirmed, which I had stopped seeing. The site was telling the world the trip was "Summer 2026," which had already happened, and it took until 11:44 for anyone to notice, and that anyone was me rereading the page as if I were a stranger. It is a small thing, and it is exactly the kind of small thing that makes a family decide not to give.

The letter

For a few weeks after that the site said, in small type, that IRS recognition had been applied for and was pending, and every parent who asked me whether their gift would be deductible got the honest answer, which was that we expected so and could not promise it. On September 16 the letter came, and the change to the site was one line of fine print. It is the least visible commit in the whole repository and the one I was happiest to make.

What's next

The parents want to know which family's friends and relatives have brought in the most, and Nicolette and I are putting up a prize to make it fun: three nights at our cabin, the one behind S'more Time Stays, given by us and not by the campaign, to the family of the player with the most gifts attributed to them by the end of the year. Zeffy already asks every donor which player sent them. What Zeffy does not do, it turns out, is hand that answer back through its API, where it comes back blank every time, so the leaderboard I am building now reads it out of the notification emails instead, once a day, and says so on the page. That is the next check-in.

Until then, the site is live at fuelthedream.org. If you know Austin, you know why.