CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – After a 24-0 start and a state championship, the Peachtree 11U All-Stars thought their season was over.

The Crozet-based team had suffered its first loss of the season at the Babe Ruth Regional Tournament in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. Victims of what head coach Jeff Kamrath called “the dreaded bad inning.”

That was enough to knock Peachtree out of the tournament and, seemingly, end its exceptional run. But on the ride back home with his family, Kamrath began to wonder if the season really was over.

“I had this thought of like ‘Man, we’re really good,'” he told Cville Right Now. “‘I wonder if somebody drops out if we somehow back door into this thing.'”

Sure enough, after a team was unable to accept their bid, Peachtree was awarded an at-large bid to the Cal Ripken World Series.

“It’s been a little bit of a roller coaster,” Kamrath said.

The bid has given Peachtree’s season a second wind, but it also comes with another major hurdle.

In order to send every player and their family to the World Series in Crown Point, Indiana, Kamrath said each family will likely spend $3500-$4000. Because of this, the team is asking the community for help.

The team had already fundraised for the trip to Tennessee, managing to raise about $800 for each family to go on just eight days’ notice. Kamrath said this next trip is “that, but kind of like on steroids.”

“You’re going for twice as long. The hotel stay is twice as long. The gas is twice as much. The food is gonna be twice as much,” he said. “And so we really are looking to the community to help support our team in that regard.”

The team’s GoFundMe page, which was originally set up to crowdfund for the regional tournament, has been updated to reflect the team’s new goal of $13,000. That goal will give every family about $1000, covering roughly a fourth of the trip.

The team leaves for Indiana next week, and Kamrath said they plan to keep the fundraiser open through the trip. As of Thursday, the team has already raised $8,500.

“Every dollar helps,” he said. “Whether somebody donates $10, $50, $100. We’ve been really fortunate to have a couple of really big donors come in and donate $1000 bucks, which has just jumpstarted the whole thing.”

Kamrath, a UVA baseball alum himself, also specially shouted out current UVA Coach Chris Pollard, who has helped support the team in a myriad of ways. Pollard visited practice with an assistant coach one day, speaking to the team for 30 minutes and running infield practice for an hour. He’s also personally donated to the team and sent an email blast to UVA baseball alumni, encouraging them to donate as well.

Since then, the team has received donations from notable alums like Ryan Zimmerman and Brandon Guyer, parents of current players and even former UVA coach Brian O’Connor.

“It tells you how important the community is to folks who lived and breathed, and [have] been a part of this community,” Kamrath said. “It’s exciting to play for them. It’s an honor to play for them because how we feel about it is we are representing our area and we want to represent it well.”

Peachtree is proud to represent their community as just the third local team to go to the World Series in either Little League or Babe Ruth. All three of those teams have come from Peachtree, and they will be joined by a fourth this year as well, as the 10-year-old team is also headed to their world series.

As the community continues to rally around them, Kamrath and his team are hard at work preparing for their second chance. Kamrath said he has a talented squad this season, made up of players who have honed their skills plating travel baseball and developed a bond with each other playing for the Peachtree League for the past six years.

“We just got some great ball players all the way around,” Kamrath. “We’re excited. We think we have a real shot of going and making an impact and hopefully making a run at it.”