Rose Parade 2024: El Segundo Little Leaguers pitch in to decorate DirecTV float
El Segundo All-Star slugger Louis Lappe, it turns out, can do more than just hit an historic walk-off homerun to win a Little League World Series championship.
He’s also skilled at meticulously placing pumpkin seeds onto a thin line of glue.
During the last day of dry decorating at Rosemont Pavilion on Thursday, Dec. 28, Lappe, Brody Brooks and the rest of the world champion All-Star team from El Segundo were pitching in on the DirecTV float that will carry them into history at the 135th Rose Parade on New Year’s Day.
The job: Squeeze out a row of glue and line up the seeds end-to-end to define the lines at the float’s front-left side in the shadow of a large gold championship trophy.
Lappe managed the task effortlessly. His teammate Brooks, working to his left, struggled a bit, placing too thin a coat of glue. The seeds wouldn’t stick.
“Dude, you want me to help you?” Lappe asked as he tossed a neat line of glue Brooks’ way.
Lappe’s mother, Kathy Narahara, stood by and watched.
“This is so cool to see this through the eyes of the boys,” she said.
It’s funny to think, Narahara said, that the now-mostly 13-year-olds were, at one time, all in kindergarten together. And now they’ve accomplished so much.
She brought Lappe to the Rose Parade when he was around that age, she said. They sat in the grandstands.
“This is a completely different perspective eight years later,” she said.
Narahara thought back to another parade.
In August, the boys, along with 19 other teams, were loaded onto flatbed trailors for a ride around South Williamsport, the Pennsyvania site of the Little League World Series. There was a light rain, she said. That procession struck her as historic — and is one she’ll never forget.
“This will be similar,” Narahara said. “Just a lot bigger.”
The enormity of riding in America’s favorite New Year’s Day event, on a Rose Parade float, and even that of winning a world championship, is a little lost on the teenagers, said manager Danny Boehle.
Boehle stood by and watched, snapping a few photos of World Series-winning son, Quinn Boehle.
When the elder Boehle was a kid, the coach said, watching the Rose Parade was a “very life affirming thing.” His family watched it together. The whole thing, from start to finish.
But with their shorter attention spans, today’s kids aren’t like that, Boehle said. Instead, modern parents struggle to entice children away from virtual worlds and pay attention to what’s happening in the real world.
“They won’t know what hit ’em,” Boehle said about the experience of riding in the parade, “until about 10 years from now. It was the same with winning the World Series.”
Player Jaxon Kalish, who admitted he’s only watched snippets of the Rose Parade, agreed with his coach.
“It’s cool because we’ll be on TV,” Kalish said. “And, yeah, like coach said, in like 10 or 15 years, we’ll appreciate it more.”
Boehle stood back in awe as he watched the team and a few family members place eucalyptus leaves on the scoreboard, descard box tops of unused seedlings and brush the float’s sides of dust and organic debris.
He shook his head in amazement.
“This is American history right here,” he said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime deal.”
Hopefully, the coach said, after the 5.5-mile ride, the waving, the cheering and the hoop-la, the teens will understand:
This is the Rose Parade and this is what we do on New Year’s Day.