What’s in a name?
For a La Grange youth baseball team, it’s been 2 million views, 30,000 retweets and $5,820 as of Friday.
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The coaches of the 10U part-time travel baseball team in La Grange Little League turned the naming rights for the squad over to the players.
“We were looking for a name to use, something different than the standard team names, something creative,” said Bill Franko, one of the team’s coaches.
The players came up with a number of proposals, from Eagles to Jedi, but Franko’s son Daniel came up with the one that stuck, Illuminati.
Showcased on kids’ TV shows, the Illuminati is an elite, secret organization of world leaders, business authorities, innovators, artists and other influential members of the planet who pull the strings to make things happen.
“It’s totally tongue in cheek,” Bill Franko said.
Finding Illuminati patches online, the squad’s jerseys sport the all-seeing eye and the saying “Trust No One.”
“The kids ate it up,” Franko said. “The whole thing caught on and there has been interest in the team.”
When La Grange resident and author Kevin Guilfoile, a parent of one of the squad’s players, posted a picture of the team in their Illuminati hooded sweatshirts, social media darlings were born.
Guilfoile said after he posted the photo, it was passed around pretty quickly.
“Just a couple hours after I put it up, it found its way to Jon Cryer and around the same time it was re-tweeted by Alex Hirsch, who created the Disney show ‘Gravity Falls,'” Guilfoile said. “That show makes a lot of Illuminati references and is probably one of the ways the kids are even aware of it.”
Likes, tweets and comments poured in on Twitter.
“We were the highest trending item at one point,” Franko said.
Requests for merchandise were made by fans and the squad responded with decals, T-shirts, hats, hooded sweatshirts and jerseys.
The team’s gofundme page, www.gofundme.com/illuminatibaseball, provides fans the opportunity to purchase Illuminati apparel and decals. The team has set a goal of $15,000, looking to raise money for the team, but also the La Grange Little League program. The page had generated $5,820 through 88 donors in its first month of existence.
“Our 15 minutes of fame has probably already expired,” Franko laughed, “but we are still pushing the merchandise. We will keep going for a little bit. This has far exceeded our expectations.”
The Illuminati are .500 thus far in the Chicagoland Sunday Baseball League, a supplement to the Little League Baseball. The La Grange team plays other youth 10 years of age and under from neighboring towns Sunday morning or afternoons.
“They love the camaraderie and doing their own thing,” Franko said of the 10-member squad.
Franko said the squad has been improving as baseball players through the extra practices and games they get with part-time travel.
“They are having a blast and learning a lot. They are learning about the game and playing at a little higher level,” Franko said. “They like playing against other towns, but they really like playing against their friends (in house league). We have been able to develop them and teach them the fundamentals of the game.”
Franko said he was somewhat concerned about some backlash when the team name gained national attention.
“I was worried about that, especially with talk on the Internet, because the Illuminati is kind of cult-ish and it is fictional, but the response has been totally positive.”
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Both Franko and Guilfoile said the team’s overnight fame has provided them with a teaching lesson about the reach of the Internet.
“The kids have been excited by the attention, which has been fun to watch,” Guilfoile said, “but I think it’s also been a lesson for them. My wife and I had a talk with both our sons to point out how different the experience would be if the photo being passed around by hundreds of thousands of people had been something embarrassing.
“I think it’s given them at least a little understanding of how powerful social media is and how careful you need to be when wielding it.”
Kevin Beese is a freelance writer with Pioneer Press.